Keep. EVERYTHING.

I couldn't tell whether it was pure panic that had set in, or decades of eating nothing but junk food, but I'm fairly sure my heart stopped when I saw the following email sitting in my inbox:

"Need you to send me the email where they approved it."

It was early 2016, and the email in question was coming from a leader that was at least three levels above me. I knew exactly which email they were looking for. Unfortunately, I had deleted it some time ago.

How could I have been so stupid? Sure, the project involving that email had ended, but given the importance of that note, it would have been smart to hang on to it.

Fortunately, a colleague who was also on that email trail had kept her copy of the message. She was kind enough to re-forward me the original note so that I didn't come across like some schlub who didn't keep track of things. After I thanked her profusely for the help, she offered me a two word response; advice that would be infinitely helpful throughout my corporate career:

Keep. EVERYTHING.

To this day, I'm pretty good about organizing my emails into easy-to-remember folder names. Some are organized by project; some by business line or executive; some are examples of ideas I may want to refer to later. I also have a folder marked "DO NOT ERASE" in case I think there's a good chance I will need to produce something later on, and one marked "FEEDBACK" so that I have a neatly-organized collection of colleague input and constructive criticism (for both myself and members of my team) to use at the year-end review cycle.

Now... I wouldn't say I'm fanatic about this. Despite my best efforts, there are always a few hundred emails that aren't categorized and sitting dormant in my inbox. In an ideal world, I would have erased or otherwise categorized them, but at least I can rest easily knowing I have stored the appropriate ones.

Of course, that's not all I do to stay organized. If any emails contain attachments or pre-reads, I try to save them immediately to files on my OneDrive so that they're backed up to the cloud. And I categorize the OneDrive folders with the same naming convention as with my inbox folders, so there's very little chance I will forget where I hid said file.

In terms of note taking, I'm also getting in the habit of storing those as well. Thanks to my RocketBook (an erasable notebook where you can take photos of your written notes and send them to your files through the corresponding App), I'm fairly good at keeping written notes organized as well. There are definitely more seamless tools for this purpose (e.g. the ReMarkable graphics tablet, which automatically turns your scribbles into text and uploads them for you), but that is more of a big budget purchase for me that may or may not happen down the road.

Of course, everything I've just said comes with one major caveat. The company you work for may very well have rules around file storage, including when and how you store information; who else may have access to it; and even for how long. This is absolutely key to any organizational plan and in my opinion, it's worth knowing those rules backwards and forwards to make sure your information is being organized properly, safely and in a compliant way.

But that's my strategy to ensuring I keep everything. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some junk food to polish off.

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