Virtual stress-free: Manage and organize documents

Productivity is not a question of what tools you use, but of habits, and if your habits are right, you will save yourself a lot of stress. Change your way of acting and improve your results. The first big step is to cultivate the habit of collecting and organizing documents. Collect everything that crosses our mind, or crosses our path and that we usually forget, or distracts us from what we are doing at that moment. We are surrounded by multiple distractions and to avoid falling into temptation and interrupting our workflow we must respond in the same way: Register it and send it to a common site where we know where to locate everything pending and decide what we do with each of those issues. Simple and with a great return. To do it you only need three things:

An inbox

Just like the one on any office table. All the notes, emails and miscellaneous material to review will end up deposited there, waiting for you to spend a few minutes once every day, or every two, to put your affairs in order. This concept is valid for the management of your topics in paper format as well as for those in virtual format. For emails, readings of your feed, Word documents or spreadsheets, and all the variety of links that reach you through social networks. Send them to a meeting point, to a virtual inbox, it can be your inbox of your email account.

A notepad and a pen

You don’t need anything else to dump all that creativity that overflows you out of your mind and your immediate memory. Think that ideas or details regarding your affairs will assail you at the most unexpected times and places, it is inevitable. It is the most natural way to record any of these moments of lucidity. If you are a fan of smartphones, think for a second about the time it takes to take out the device, open the corresponding application and type, or record the note. Too complicated. It will work for you on quiet occasions, if there is a bit of a mess you will end up taking the easy way out: choosing to keep it in your memory so you can think about writing it down 5 minutes later. If you do it repeatedly you will end up losing the habit of collecting your ideas and you will return to the starting point.

Persist

As I told you, we seek to create a habit to change the way we function. That is only achieved through repetition. Make it as easy as possible, with your tools and your way of doing it. When an idea comes to mind, put aside your critical sense, don’t stop to think if it is necessary or not, you will decide at the end of the day when you review your stack of papers in the inbox. Hang in there and write it down without delay, after a couple of weeks it will be an automatic process. It is a mistake to trust memory, our mind is not made to maintain information in the area of ​​immediate memory (the person’s RAM) where we accumulate data to use shortly but which disappear due to their lack of importance. Striving to remember, to keep them ‘charged’, only leads us to consume energy and generate noise in the form of additional worries. We have all gone through those moments where we try to remember what we had to do in the morning, what we had to buy at the supermarket or simply that feeling that something has left my mind and I think it was important. We focus on remembering, completely forgetting what is important: Our tasks and commitments, occupying our minds with remembering instead of creating or executing. An unproductive activity, don’t you think?