Even neat-desk types can benefit from quick visual clues about what goes where and what’s inside a folder. Learning how to use color-coding to organize your home office will save time and ease frustration when you’re looking for documents and supplies.
Use Colors According to What They Mean to You
Green means go; red means stop; yellow means caution—we learn this from the earliest days of crossing the street. In addition to traffic lights, color codes have been used to indicate threat levels, such as the prevalence of infection in geographic areas. They’ve even been used to label states by their predominant political persuasions.
When you’re deciding how to use color-coding to organize your home office, pay attention to your most immediate associations with individual colors: green may mean money to you, but it could also indicate a folder with a project that has been green-lit. Red could mean work that has stopped, or it could mean work that’s extremely urgent (“code red”). Yellow could mean happy or hazardous. Your system will be successful if there’s no confusion about what the colors mean in your individual color-coding scheme.
Code Consistently
Once you’ve decided which colors you’ll associate with what—types of work, urgency of work, client, or subject—be consistent with your color code across all applications. This means the colors on your calendar should correspond to the colors of your file folders. You can even fasten documents with staples in different colors that correspond to the hanging folder in which you’ll keep them or that signify the creator or the subject of the document.
If you use a physical planner or bullet journal, use the same color-coding system when you write in them, and do the same for sorting e-mails.
Don’t Overthink It
Color-coding works best if you keep it simple. Office supplies may keep expanding the number of colors and shades of colors available, but using a complicated palette of colors will create more confusion than organization. Purchase file folders, hanging files, staples, and pens or markers in the fewest number of colors you need to divide your work by subject, urgency, stage of completion, or client. Three-ring binder colors and their tab separators will also give you fast ways to get at the information you need to keep your work flowing.
