I’m one of those people who has grand pretentions towards being orderly. One day. One day, I will invent a system which enables me to keep everything orderly and neat. However, I must confess that this has always been theory only. As I have confessed in an earlier post, I am a notorious stacker of paper on desks. In other words, my desk is invariably messy, no matter what filing system I employ. Presently, the pile of papers to read for my thesis is divided into two piles. Actually, there’s no order to it, I had to split the tower because it really was so tall that it fell down.
Anyway, I have purchased one of those labelling machines. This will be the key to the new orderly me! I have already gone through the filing cabinet and reordered and relabelled all the files. And I’ve labelled half my ring binders, so now I can actually tell what is in them (always a good move). I need to find a good system for labelling my collection of case law - at the moment, it’s simply filed under a numbered tag, but I’m thinking it might be better to reorder by jurisdiction and general topic. The problem is that there will always be those cases which don’t fit into any file…no taxonomy of law is perfect. Also I haven’t decided quite how to categorise some cases in my thesis, let alone in folders. Those vexatious breach-of-negative-covenant + award-of-”reasonable fee” cases are a real pest. Are they restitutionary? Compensatory? Profit based? No one can agree. I might put them in a folder with the label of “Too bloody hard for words”.
My husband is gently bemused by all this labelling, but takes it all in his stride. I suspect, as with all my schemes, this will fall into a heap and the giant piles of papers will reemerge somehow. But I’m trying to remain positive. Humour me.
7 Comments
You need Infoselect:
http://www.miclog.com
Sounds good to me - I have numerical dyslexia, and thus terrible problems remembering numerical PINs…my card has been swallowed a few times…
Best way to get rid of clutter is to deal with it in the first place. Leaving something on your desk for later is the problem. Same with emails. Usually, the best time to deal with a document is when you read it for the first time. And if that isn’t a good time, then why are you wasting it by reading something you don’t have the time to deal with properly? If you really really want to think about it or deal with it later, put it away and give yourself a reminder in your diary for a few days to then deal with it.
/2 cents
I try to only have 1 file on my desk at a time. Other lawyers get freaked when they see this, but I would get freaked having my desk swamped with files like they have.
Empty Desk = Empty Mind
If God did not intend us to put stuff on horizontal surfaces He would not have invented gravity.
There are free web-based information managers that sound like webloc (don’t use it, so not sure) - backpackit.com or todoist.com. I used to use todoist but no longer. Kept being confronting with all the things I had not done.
However, the way I manage cases and essays is alphabetise hard copies in folders and have my own private wordpress blog where the subject is the case name, I cut and paste head note into the body of the post, and then I tag to my heart’s delight all the subjects that the case / essay could conceivably cover, including jurisdiction etc.
Another thing you could do, if your cases are on the internet is use del.icio.us to tag them, then you will also have a permanent link to the cases.
It is a bit of work at the ‘front end’ but after that, it should be reasonably easy. Not that I’m keeping up, but heck I do mine for paid work (not billable, keying cases into private weblog) and not for my academic work.
Wish I’d had this for my arts honours thesis! Instead I just had lots of colourful sticky notes as my cross-referencing system, and I had to be judicious about what each colour meant.
The trick, Francis, is to have 1 file on the desk at all times.