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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/c5t9mn. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

A common complaint that even well-organized people have has to do with storage of reference material & the archiving of old, completed records.

How long should you keep those important documents?

The short answer is - it depends. I did a little research and found a handful of lists and guidelines for record retention, that I have compiled here for you:

• Automobile records (title, registration, repairs) - as long as you own the vehicle
• ATM receipts - if to 6 years if you need them for tax purposes
• Bank statements - up to 6 years (but you should be able to access these online nowadays)
• Credit Card statements - up to 6 years, again for tax purposes
• Insurance policies - (auto, homeowner/renter, liability, medical, life, etc) up to 5 years after a policy ends, in case of late claims
• Investment purchase records - as long as you own them
• Investment sales records - up to 6 years for tax purposes
• Receipts -
  • Appliances - as long as you own the item
  • Art or antiques - as long as you own the item
  • Clothing - until the end of the return/exchange limit
  • Credit Card slips - personal - until you reconcile your statement, business - up to 6 years for tax purposes
  • Medical - up to 6 years
  • Tax-related - up to 6 years
  • Utility bills - up to 2 years
  • Warranties - life of the warranty, or as long as you own the item
• Resume -Keep one updated copy of your resume (and keep your LinkedIn account current too)
• Tax Records - Keep this year and the previous 6 years (and next year tax-time ought to be pretty exciting!) These records include:
  • Bank statements
  • Cancelled Checks (pretty soon these will all be online too)
  • Certificates of Deposit
  • Contracts
  • Charitable contributions
  • Credit Statements
  • Income tax returns
  • Lease and Loan agreements
  • Loan payment books
  • Pay stubs
• Vital Permanent records - There are a few papers and records that you should keep forever (like Dark Side of the Moon):
  • Birth certificate
  • Death certificate
  • Adoption records
  • Citizenship papers
  • Marriage certificate
  • Divorce certificate
  • Last will and testament
  • Medical records
  • Passport
  • Power of Attorney records
  • Social Security records

What can I purge?

Looking at the above list can be a little disconcerting, but those papers really don’t take up that much space. What does take up a lot of space are the things that you do not need (there’s that pesky 80/20 rule again). Things like junk mail, phone books (seriously, who uses a paper phone book anymore?), expired coupons and special offers, old greeting cards* and invitations.

*[Unless the card or invite has a very special meaning. “Happy Birthday, love Joe” doesn’t cut it.]

You know what else can go in the shredder? All of the above items that are past the retention date. And those magazines that you are never going to read. And business cards of people that you will never call or do business with. Old brochures and travel junk. Old maps. That box of recipes that you’ve been collecting but never made a single thing. And clothes that you don’t wear because they are outdated/don’t fit/you just don’t like them.

Take a good, hard look and narrow your focus

I am willing to bet that there is a lot of stuff that you could get rid of, even if you’re not moving. Not only will a good purge make you feel better about where you live, it makes it easier to keep your home and living areas organized.

Storing Your Reference Materials

For reference materials you have 3 powerful tools: A file Cabinet, Bookshelves & Google Desktop Search. For physical record that you need to keep, depending on the format, they should be stored close at hand. Label them clearly,either with their own file folder or a sticker on the spine of th book/binder/whatever. It is important that each item that can go in a file cabinet get its own folder so that you do not have to search though a jumble of paper to find the one that you are looking for.

A useful tip for reference items is to attach a 3×5 card to each item so that you can track how often you use it. Of course, there may be items that you use daily, but you may discover that less-frequently-referenced items can safely be stored elsewhere, or archived. This feature will come in handy when you do your annual “Spring Cleaning” to purge your workspace of things that you do need.

Another recommendation is to scan as many physical records into an electronic format as often as possible. This frees up valuable storage space and these records can be inexpensively copied & stored off site as part of your disaster recovery plan. See this Work.Life.Creativity post:

I implemented a program in my dept. a few years back so we could cut down on the time it took to find documents. Everything to do with accounting is in there which makes our yearly audits a breeze. I burn all of the scans to DVD weekly and take them off site in case something catastrophic should happen to our building. We wouldn’t even miss a beat if the building was gone since all of the software is backed up daily and all of the paper is digitized.

When these records are digitized then Google Desktop Search becomes a valuable tool for referencing them. GDS is capable of indexing every file, document and application stored on your hard drive, including the e-mails in your e-mail client.

This means that you no longer need to print & save those “important” e-mails as they can be saved, tagged & labeled for ease of recovery. As the ultimate e-mail backup tool I have set up my e-mails accounts & e-mail client to BCC every in-and out-bound e-mail message to a special G-mail account for storage in the Cloud - accessible from anywhere.

Don’t forget your Spring Cleaning

There is one last tool I’d like to mention, and that is the “Spring Cleaning” mentioned above. It is important to go thru your workspace at least once a year in order to archive or toss these items that you don’t need anymore. It is remarkable how much stuff can sneak into your workspace when you aren’t looking.

What do you do to control the amount of “stuff” in your workspace? Share your thoughts in the Comments.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/agmndg. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Today’s guest post is from Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint.

So how do you interview and land the job you want,

at the salary you desire,

with the benefits you need?

It’s as simple as J.O.B. training, says career expert Mark Schnurman.  Mark’s piece in the Star Ledger this past week was phenomenal.  You can read the online link here.  In sum, Mark breaks down the process of selling yourself into three categories.

First, it’s important to convince your interviewer that you have JOB SPECIFIC SKILLS.  If you are interviewing for a job in car sales, it’s important to stress your ability to close the deal, maintain relationships well after the sale is made, etc.  The interviewer needs to hear that you can handle the 3-4 key skills that are absolutely necessary for the job.

Next, Mark suggests that you support your job specific skills with OVERALL SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE.  If you have a lot of experience, stress this.  If your character is amazingly solid, emphasize that.  If you’ve never been sick in the last ten years, mention this.  These are the “soft” qualities that people too often stress first in an interview. It’s not that they’re not important- they are.  The key is to wrap them around your job specific skills.

Finally, Mark recommends that you emphasize how much you would BE A GOOD FIT for the organization.  This is a culture question- would you be a good match for the general vibe of the culture in which you’re hoping to work?  Don’t fake it, just be yourself.  I would recommend that you interview within a culture that you accept and see the good in.  If youre only interest is in making an organization different from what it currently is (I think we would put that in the “hatchet man” category), there might be some room for deeper reflection.

GTD APPLICATION

From a GTD perspective, interviewing and finding the job you want is just another outflow of your project list.  As Stephen has often posted here at Productivity in Context, a running list of all of your projects is essential to productivity.  Here’s how the landing of your new job could play out in a project list:

1. List “New Job” as a project
2. List “Next Actions” such as: identify 3 online job banks, call 4 contacts for advice, edit resume

Then go to it!  When you have a trajectory playing out in your mind and in your projects list, your job hunt will go smoother.  You won’t feel like to you have to be job searching at every hour of the day (thank God!) and the job you want will eventually come your way.  If it sounds too simplistic, it’s not.  I’ve used this process many times and it always pays off.  Good luck!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/ahxsxd. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Here is a short video that I made (pardon the roughness!) about my Next Action Tracking tools:

Shortly I will revise my “How I do GTD” post with the new tools and tactics that I am learning from David Allen’s new book, “Making it all work”.

Stay tuned.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/dhd2e9. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen