How to - Home organizing tips - How to color code your files

I want to teach you how to color code your files. Color coding is a great way to spice up your filing system and also its a great way to help you remember where your files are. I want to talk about a few tips in regard to using color coding. First you want to limit your color selections to about three to five colors. If it gets more than that it might be too confusing for the brain to remember what color corresponds to what category. You also want to keep it fairly simple. You don't want to have an over complicated system. You want to just keep it to basic five categories. For example, a basic home office might have categories such as, you might want to use orange for anything that is family related, kids, such as your children's paper work from school and any family fun events or memorabilia as or you children's drawings, this would be a good category. Another category that you might commonly have in a home office file may be things that are money related and green might be a good color for money. The point is that you want to chose colors that personally speak to you. There is no rules to follow, everyone is very different. You have to sort of go with your instinct and think about what each color represents to you personally and usually your first answer is probably right. Again, you want to keep the categories as simple as possible. You don't really want to make multi layers such as green is for money, but then blue is for credit cards. Its too complicated and too much for your brain to handle. Also I want to remind you that when you using color coding or actually even just for manila folders its a good idea to have a white label over your file for labeling because its a lot easy to read black against white then say pencil writing or black against a color. Its just much easier on the eyes. Also for your hanging folders, I know a lot of those color coded hanging folders come with colored tinted plastic label protectors as well. I would suggest get clear ones because having colors on the files is already very helpful but when you have tinted plastic label protectors sometimes it makes reading a label a little bit harder and makes it confusing. I want to suggest keeping the label positions relatively simple instead of trying to use every label position because when you open up a file drawer and if you have labels in every direction coming at you its really hard for your eyes to look for an item so you want to keep it fairly simple. For example items with the same category may have the labels on the same tab position.