Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Why Bother Organising?
Last weekend I had to find my passport. The last time I remembered seeing it was two years ago (strangely enough, around the time I got home from my last over seas trip). I was pretty certain it was in the room with all our filing. Since it had been almost two years since I’d last done the filing (which was around the same time I last saw my passport) I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone.
By the end of the day, I had everything safely in its right file. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t found my passport. It wasn’t in any of the promising-sounding files like “holiday stuff” or “stuff to be filed”, and it definitely wasn’t behind the filing cabinet. So I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to pay for a new passport, and started putting all the files away.
As I was putting the very last of the files into the filing cabinet, I felt something small slip inside and out peeked a blue corner. It was my passport! Naturally I’d filed it away in “Tax Documents” along with my will.
So despite filing my passport somewhere that obviously made sense at the time, it was still only pure luck that I’d found it at all. In fact, if I hadn’t bothered filing my passport in the first place and just left it in the big pile of bills and receipts, I would have found it a lot sooner.
My day really boiled down to one question. If I’m going to have to search through every document anyway, why did I bother spending a whole day sorting it out?
TRIM, much like my filing cabinet, makes me sort through my documents and put them all in the right home. And, just like my filing cabinet, if I make a stupid mistake somewhere along the way, it might take forever to find my passport again. In a world where the likes of Google promise to find my passport – no matter if its in “Tax Documents”, “Travel Stuff” or behind the couch – in less time then it takes me to actually ask for it, why should I waste my time organising and filing my electronic documents? What possible advantage does it give me?
