Whether in the office or at home, and despite the digitisation of various daily tasks, the culture of paper continues to prevail on many occasions. Which implies keeping files and documents considered important, sometimes mixed with various papers.
Receipts, invoices, contracts, deeds, minutes … the worst of habits, and more in their domestic use, is to pile them in a corner or store them in a drawer without any order. However, we insist that not all documents are equally confidential and, therefore, there are some that require a higher level of care or protection.
Even the great gurus of decoration and order, not only those of security, insist on document classification as one of the essential pillars to maintain perspective on our information.
For this reason, we want to remind you of the following advice applicable on a professional, but also personal level:
- Gather all the paper documents, discard the ones you no longer need and classify the rest by subject (patrimonial, financial, legal, personal …).
- Categorize them according to the confidentiality, importance and interrelation of their content (originals, copies, annotations …).
- Determine the life cycle of each document (draft, pending, resolved, obsolete).
- Locate one or more specific places for your files and assign an appropriate level of protection depending on the type of document (for example, locked).
- Consider the digitisation of documents whose originals are not necessary or mandatory to keep (documents to be kept in original: deeds, statutes, notarial acts and similar).
- Protect digital files (for example, installing an antivirus and a firewall on the device; using external memories that are encrypted with a password; making use of Clouds that provide adequate levels of security…).