Career Spring Cleaning: Document Wrangling

 

If you're like me, you have career documents spread out across multiple devices: smart phone, tablet, laptop, maybe even a desktop. Have you bookmarked websites and blogs for future reference? Do you have an actual stack of paper on your desk with articles you printed but haven't read yet? After a while, these things can pile up, and the idea of overhauling your work space can seem overwhelming. Spring cleaning presents a great excuse to organize your career documents. Starting this week (and for the next month), I will outline some tips to help you more effectively manager your career tools. And you'll only need about 20 minutes a day!

1. Filing System: Organization

The first thing to do is get all your career documents together. Choose one place to keep everything, and start by consolidating all the documents from your secondary devices. If that's your laptop, go through the existing files. Delete old ones. Set up new ones. If you also keep paper files, be sure to read those articles and either file as appropriate or recycle.

2. Clean Up Email

Have you saved emails with attached career documents that you meant to read, but haven't? They are not going to file themselves (or maybe there's an app for that now?). Take a look this week and file or delete as needed. 

3. Cull Your Bookmarks

I'll be the first to admit that I love to bookmark! I try to get back to those sites, blogs and articles, but sometimes, I never visit again. There are many programs you can use to organize your bookmarks, but you still must decide what's a keeper and what's not. 

4. Back Up Your Documents

Once you have culled and re-organized your files, be sure to back them up. You don't want to lose important documents (like your resume), so upload them onto a flash drive or burn them onto a CD. 

This is the first step. Finally weeding through those files will make you feel amazing! Wake up 20 minutes earlier and do this while you have your coffee, and you'll be done in just one week.

Next week: Resume and Bio Updates