RW Makeover: Organizing market information
One of Jennifer’s makeover goals is to develop a organization system for the market information she collects. Like most writers, Jen gets volumes of market information from a variety of sources: books, magazines, websites, e-mails, and more. Her ideal system would be computer-based, with a binder-system as a backup. Right now, she says she just collects the e-mails in her inbox and they don’t get put to good use.
One of the basic principles of organizing is to put like with like. With that in mind, I would shelve all parenting books together and next to them, also shelve your parenting magazines, using magazine holders that let you store the magazines upright. If you have dozens of magazines, label and use different magazine holders for different magazines. That way, if you remember that you saw a particular article in Parents magazine, you won’t have to sort through all your magazines. Okay, now. All that said, only save magazines that are jam-packed with useful information. If all you really need to save is one article or several, set up binders or one binder with tabs for subjects; i.e., preschool or nutrition. With emails, what you can do is save them to folders that correspond with your binder subjects. No need to print them out! If you haven’t already done so, download the Google Desktop search engine. This is an amazing tool that lets you search your entire computer hard drive using keywords to find documents, emails and even Web history of sites you’ve visited. Try it; you’ll love it! Finally, when you find Websites you believe are good resources, add them to your Favorites. Then organize your Favorites list by subject. To do this, click on Favorites, then on Organize Favorites. Create folders for each subject and then move related web sites into those folders. When you want to research a particular subject, you’ll be able to pull all of your resource material quickly and easily. [Donna Smallin, unclutter.com]
If you liked that post, you might also like:
Dec 11, 2006 RW Makeover
