Organised lists

I wanted to share my latest quick organising project because although it's kind of specific to my job, it shows how investing a few minutes or dollars into simplifying things can pay off. 

A little background info- we have around half a dozen pricelists at work, each one 4-5 pages long. They were all printed onto plain white paper with the name of the specific pricelist on the first page and were all stored in a standard plain black display file. I use these pricelists fairly regularly, at least several times a week and often away from my computer and it was annoying flicking through constantly. I'd always meant to do something about it but never carved out time to do it. 

So I was at Officeworks last week and saw they have a whole aisle full of funky new letter files and document wallets etc etc. I kind of wanted to buy it all and just look at it all day but I just bought this cute little 10-page display file and some coloured paper. Total purchase just over $10

So my best step was to re-format the pricelists. I changed them from 3-columns to 4 columns, added lines between the columns for clarity, removed superfluous headers and footers, changed the font and spacing and basically just condensed it down while ensuring it was easy to read. The result was two-page pricelists. 

And lastly, I printed the lists onto coloured paper (we have a kind of shorthand where different colours represent different areas so I tried to keep as closely to that as I could with the colours I used for the pricelists) and filed them. Now i can flick open to a particular pricelist, I don't have to double-check the heading to make sure it's the right one and I don't have to keep flicking back and forth as I go from the first item on the list to the last, they're all on the same double page. 

Honestly, it's one of those things where I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner!!!