Having a well-organized filing cabinet is essential for being a well-organized person. Without one, you’ll probably find yourself drowning in a sea of messy papers, unpaid bills, lost important documents, and misplaced winning lottery tickets (okay, maybe that one’s a little unlikely). For a couple years, I worked as an office assistant, where I learned more about filing than most of you will ever know. Luckily for you, I’m about to share some of my secret knowledge. Pay attention, and you could become a master filer as well. Here are the ten steps to reorganizing your filing system (or starting a filing system for the first time).

1. Have a plan. Yes, that’s right, a plan. Devise the most logical way to organize the files. But don’t psych yourself out. After all, they’re just files. Come up with a system, but keep it simple.

How you decide to organize your files depends on how large your filing cabinet is (you might just have a drawer), how many files you have, and what your individual needs are. I have a filing cabinet with two large drawers, and one narrow file holder on top. In one drawer I keep all my personal files (bills, tax information, bank statements, and assorted random financial and personal documents) - in alphabetical order. In the other drawer I keep files related to my business. In the narrow holder on top, I keep “live” business files that I may need to access again soon.

The flaw with this particular system is that all the statements for a particular bill are in one folder, regardless of date. For instance, all bills and correspondence relating to my cable internet are in one folder, so if I were to need a bill from a certain month, I would have to sort through all of them.  I compensate for this by always putting the newest bill at the back of the folder so they will be in chronological order. The flaw in my system doesn’t bother me, but if I were slightly more anal about certain things, I might choose to have a separate folder for each month’s worth of bills, instead.

2. Clear a workspace. A table, a desk, or possibly even a wide clean space on the floor.

3. Collect all the documents that need to be filed, and stack them up in one central place.

4. Sort them into piles according to the clever new system you’ve devised. At this point, you may begin to perceive some flaws in your system. That’s good, because you still have time to change it. You might also find that along with important documents to be filed, you’ve collected a lot of junk and useless records that you could probably get rid of. Now is an excellent time to do that. Don’t forget to recycle.

5. When you’re happy with the organization of your piles, put a sticky note on each, with the desired label for each folder. At the same time, write that same phrase on one central piece of paper. For example, for the pile of phone bills, you should have one sticky note that says “phone bills” attached to the pile, and one line that says “phone bills” written across your piece of paper. This will make sense in a moment, I promise.

6. Choose a system of manila and hanging folders. (In case you didn’t know, hanging folders are the heavier, typically green folders with little metal hooks to hold them up inside the drawer. Manila folders are the lighter, typically cream-colored folders.)  This will depend on how many files you have or intend to have in each pile. For example, you could have a hanging folder labeled “insurance”, and then separate manila folders inside it, labeled “renter’s insurance,” “car insurance,” and “health insurance”.

7. Put each of those stacks into their folders, moving the sticky note to the outside of the folder, if you like.

8. Now take your central sheet of paper to the computer. Hopefully you’ve purchased a sheet of labels that are correctly sized to place on folders. If not, you better go do that. If you use Microsoft Word, you can create a document that is perfectly and specially formatted for your particular sheet of labels. Do this by:

i. Opening Microsoft Word
ii. Clicking on “Tools”
iii. Clicking on “Envelopes and Labels”
iv. Clicking on “Options”
v. Selecting the specific product number for your labels. This should be printed on the outside of the label package, or on the label sheet itself.
vi. Clicking OK.
vii. Clicking New Document.
Or, if you are lucky enough to have a label maker, you can just use that.

Make sure you create labels for both the outer folders and the inner folders. In some cases, when there’s only one manila folder inside a hanging folder, the label will be the same. In the case of the insurance, for example, the hanging folder will say “insurace” while the manila folders will be more specific.

9. Now that you have your labels, you can go back and put them on your folders. Luckily they’re labeled with sticky notes, so you won’t have to spend any time trying to remember which folder was supposed to be labeled what.  You can stick the labels directly on the manila folders. The hanging folders should come with a set of plastic tabs. Place the sticky label on the card inset, then slide it into the plastic tab. If the sticky label is too large, you might have to trim the edges with scissors.

10. Voila! You have your files, ready to go. All that’s left to do now is put them back into the drawers in the order you’ve devised, which I assume will either be alphabetical or chronological.

One last tip: new bills and paperwork will certainly come along, no doubt longing for a warm and cozy home inside your file cabinet. Don’t make them wait out in the cold! Keep up with your filing, putting away all the new stuff no less frequently than once a month. You will thank yourself. Believe me.