The paperless office is like a unicorn: you hear about it all the time, but you’ve never seen one. As long as paper continues to appear in offices, business owners can find ways to manage their paper and get better organized and more efficient in the process.

Avoid an avalanche

Paper is a fact of life and always will be, arriving every day by fax, snail mail and delivery truck. A major key to avoiding the avalanche in the first place is your ability to answer the questions -- "where does it all come from?" and "can I stop it?"

Subscriptions, catalogs, memos, faxes, letters, reports and bills are just a few of the obvious categories. Once you know where the majority of your paper is coming from, you can take preventive measures to reduce the flow; for example, cancel subscriptions, switch to paperless invoices or have people send you e-mails instead of memos or faxes.

Paper By Pile

After you’ve slowed the influx of non-essential paper, take a look at the documents that still remain in your office. There are typically three categories of paper in an office:

1. Active Paper is associated with tasks you perform frequently. For example: calls to make, forms to fill out and submit, data entry or travel itineraries. Active papers are those that are used most often — daily or several times a week. These belong in active files that are readily accessible — within or next to your desk.

Active files become parts of your paperwork system. To expedite filing and retrieval, it is important to have your filing system set up so that the labels match your "what-do-I-do-with-it" categories, e.g., Clients, Marketing, Reference, Projects, Accounting. Remember to keep the paper flowing to its final destination.

2. Project Paper is paper associated with a longer-term task or goal. Examples: client projects, research paperwork or planning exercises requiring tracking and associated documents or contracts. These are things you are currently working on but don’t need to see daily, not past projects (which will go in the next category).

3. Inactive Paper is needed for backup, legal or personal reasons. Examples: insurance policies, financial statements, retirement planning, taxes, corporate minutes and other similar files. Reference papers are those used infrequently. If at all possible, keep them out of your office. Otherwise relegate them to a file cabinet or bookcase in the least accessible location — top shelves or the back of file drawers. If you are archiving documents for legal reasons, consider turning them into digital files for easy and affordable storage.

One way many businesses are storing archived files is in an online document management system. Inactive paperwork can be converted to digital images and put into a secure, searchable online file cabinet that you and/or your employees can access at any time. But, without the headache of additional file cabinets and off-site storage facility fees.

Stephanie Culp says in her book, You Can Find More Time for Yourself Every Day, "Whether it’s the piles of paper in your office or the clutter in your home, getting organized is a major time-saver. Eliminate what you don’t need, organize the things that you must keep, and put some simple systems into place to keep things from getting out of control in the future."