Digital Declutter

You are probably familiar with the concept of decluttering your home. What may not be so obvious is that most businesses, in addition to shredding and filing their paper documents probably have a similar issue with their digital data.

I often start to describe “an office” to people – with filing cabinets full of paper, information all over the place, post-it notes with reminders to call people back, data in accounting systems and databases, Excel spreadsheets, contacts in phones and handheld devices, diaries, and in your head.

And people say “have you been to my office?”!

The point is that most offices look a bit like that – and it is not really an efficient way to run a business – especially if there is more than one person in the organisation – think of the above multiplied many times!

And now, with data protection laws firmly in place, as business owners and managers we have a duty to understand exactly where all our data is – especially if you are holding “personal” data relating to customer, employees and contacts (and that is pretty much all businesses). And this is where the “digital declutter” becomes imperative.

No longer is it acceptable for individual members of staff to keep a wee spreadsheet of contact information separate from the main business database (if you have one) – as it is unlikely to be a) secure and b) up to date and relevant – two of the key principles of GDPR.

However, the main driver should not just be compliance – the goal should be good business practice and efficiency. It’s time-consuming and difficult to find the right information and keep it up to date if it’s all over the place – so having centralised, secure systems makes good business sense. And you can control who can access it at different levels, and help to prevent data “disappearing”.

Then there are all the “little files” that find themselves littered all over your laptop and other devices.? We quite often will save something “in case” we need it later.? PC/laptop desktops can be full of these (unless you have an IT policy that prevents you saving there!).??

It’s often when we come to perform a task maybe annually or once a quarter that we suddenly need to pull a lot of files together - and find them all over the place.? Not to mention, of course, all the versions we keep “because”...

It’s time to give some thought to a file structure that will work for you and your business - especially if you have to share with anyone else.? Take some time to do this and you will get this time back when everything is in the right place - and you have got rid of all the “just in case” files!

So give some thought to performing a digital declutter in your organisation. If you would like some ideas I’d be happy to assist – just PM me or comment below.?