It can be really frustrating to have a system in place to manage your filing or paper work only to find that it is not meeting your needs. What to do? Well, you can throw out the old system and start over or you can modify the exisiting system that actually worked well for you for awhile. When given a choice I always modify the exisiting system. Understand that life is never static. Things change, your needs change, the way you think about things may change, the way you want to retrieve documents may change – be flexible and adapt your system to you. Maybe you have decided that broader categories work better for you. Keep a pad of paper beside your computer and write the name of a broad category down (and the things that category includes) as it occurs to you. Do this for 2 weeks. Then set aside some time to make those changes and you will have tweaked your system to make it work better for you.
