Imporant areas to organize?

[susan silva]

What areas are most important for you to keep organized.  (Email, your desk, the files, home, etc?)  How do you do that? 

[thomkat]

For me personally, I HAVE to have my email organized.   I get SO much email everyday from 10 people I support and every company we deal with.  If I didn't keep it organized I couldn't find anything. 

[gee4]

All of it Susan, my middle name is organised!  (I think we've discussed this before in another thread).

I don't find being organised a problem.  As I have said previously I schedule all my tasks in Outlook.  I set reminders every hour so that I can update/delete them as they are complete.

I prioritise tasks in order of importance eg. my boss comes first and then everyone else falls into line.

For me, being a PA and being organised, go hand in hand.

As for home, that's the same, organised.

[Atlanta Z3]

This has changed a little for me with two new bosses.  I have created folders (color coded of course) for each of them on my desk Projects/Misc and Invoices.  The misc will be my catch all for when I can catch them to get information I need.  Keeping those folders organized and up to date I hope will work to not drop any balls. 
It used to be my outlook inbox, I prefer only to keep active items in there and get a little freaked if that is over a 100 emails, but lately that has taken a back seat.  My last task on Friday is to clear out the in box to start the week fresh and make sure I didn't miss anything.

[Katie G]

In a perfect world, of course, I'd say all of it.  However, the chaotic nature of our business and the time constraints under which we work in our department....

I work on keeping the paper files as organized as possible.  For email and computer files, I can always do a "search" and find what I'm looking for (particularly in the departmental drive).  I don't have that luxury with paper files.   

That's not to say I let the computer drives and email just go to pot, but often we're under such unrealistic time crunches that if I have to choose, I'm going to choose to worry about the paper, because once that's gone, it's GONE.