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Remember the days before computers. Remember the dream: the paperless office! We would all have shiny desks and uncluttered corners. Is your office really like that? No, mine neither.

The bad news is that unless you (a) don't believe in audit trails and/or (b) are a senior manager with the ability to delegate everything to someone else it never will be.

Paper will continue to dominate our office spaces. So we need to get a system to deal with it.

1. THE PAPERWORK LIFE CYCLE

A major problem associated with pieces of paper is their tendency to arrive on your desk and get stuck. The way out of this is to learn the Life Cycle approach. Each piece of paper goes through a number of stages once it enters the building:

* Incoming
* Receiving attention
* Pending
* Outgoing
* Filing
* Disposal

Every single piece of paper in your office falls into one of those categories. So all you need to do have a place to keep each category and to ease the route from each stage to the next.

Please note that not all Incoming paper will go through every stage. Many can go straight from Incoming to Disposal (although technically while the flyer is in your hand & you're thinking "what rubbish" you could argue that it is receiving attention').

2. DESKS & STORAGE

The second idea to grasp is that whatever stage it is at, paper will be in one of two places: either on your desk or stored in the filing cabinet. For filing cabinet, read: office cabinets, archive stores (which may be on- or off-site), secure/fire-proof stores (for legal documents).

3. MANAGING THE DESK

We've all seen the nightmare desk. It is covered in so much paperwork that you cannot tell what colour the wood is. Or even if it is wood, laminate, plastic or whatever under there. It belongs to the person who believes that a busy desk implies a busy (& therefore important) person.

Amazingly some people can actually function with a desk like this. The kind of person who when the clock-hand says 5pm simply puts own their pen and walk out. Tomorrow morning they will walk back in a 9am, pick up the pen and start work again.

They are doing a job, but they are not working effectively. They might be able to find any single thing you ask them forbut try asking them to list everything currently on their desk and outline the stage it is at. Then take cover as the many heaps and piles start to shuffle into chaos.

To control paperwork on your desk, you cannot beat the old-fashioned stack-tray system. You need four trays: In, Filing, Pending, Out. They should

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