Organizing and using stacking trays

- Occasionally, people reach out to me with questions about my Time Management Fundamentals course here on the Library. The most popular question is, "What should I do with stacking trays?" I recommend that people who go through that course have a variety of supplies on hand, one of them being a set of about six plastic stacking trays. What are we supposed to do with these things? In short, stacking trays are for creating homes. Homes are the resting place for things after you process them.

Homes are different than what I refer to as a gathering point, which is a place where unresolved, unprocessed items go. In other words, you take something out of a gathering point, you process it, and then, if you need to keep it, put it into a home. A home can be anything like a filing cabinet or a Tupperware container or stacking trays. Personally, I have four stacking trays that I use. I have the luxury of working in a home office.

So my first stacking tray is for my wife. When I'm processing, any time something pops up that I need to give to her, I put them into a home called Katherine outbox. Then later, when I'm done with processing, I take the entire outbox for her and dump it into her inbox, her gathering point. And then she processes it according to her schedule. The next stacking tray that I use is Waiting for. This is where I put short-term things that are really too big to file away or would take too much time to do that, and I just want to have quick access to them in the next week or two.

That way, when the appointment pops up on my calendar, that tells me I need to work on an item, I know that I can simply reach into my Waiting for tray, and there it is. The third tray is for Shredding. Any kind of sensitive documents that I have, I don't want to take up time during processing to shred them one by one by one. No, instead I put them all into that one tray, and then once it gets full, I do it all at once. Well, in my case, what I do is I pay my son a couple of bucks to do all the shredding for me since that's not the most valuable use of my time.

And last, I have a tray for Reading. This is for magazines or books that I want to go through at some point. Whenever I go on a trip, I just grab a couple of magazines or a book and put it in my briefcase for reading on the flight. Alternatively, if you have a Reading tray, you can schedule time in your calendar to do reading on a monthly or a weekly basis. Then you just pull something out of that tray when the time arrives to read. Hopefully, that gives you a starting point of ideas.

Kind in mind, there's no limit to how many homes that you can create. While I recommend that you have six or less gathering points, you can have hundreds of homes. Feel free to have as many stacking trays or places where you can put stuff. Just be sure that when you create a new home, you clearly label it and don't let anything else get in there. Remember, everything has a home, and no visitors allowed.