To be better organised, know yourself

It's true: Want to be organized? Know thyself. | Unclutterer: "Someone who is easily distracted shouldn’t have an intricate paper filing system based on numbers and codes. Someone who takes his shoes off at the front door shouldn’t have a shoe organizing system in his bedroom. The more a system reflects how you live and your preferences, the more likely it is to work for you."
When I started out in ministry I bought Michael Saward's filing system. It's a well thought out system and I was able to use it, but found it a bit of a faff. A few years later, I came across a piece of advice that led me to abandon the system. You see, I'd found that Michael's system reflected his interests and priorities. There were things that her was clearly interested in and thought to be important for a clergybeing to have in their filing system which I just didn't use at all, and there were things I needed to add in that were relevant to my interests and priorities that clearly weren't his. So there were point at which his filing system creaked or echoed hollowly.

The piece of advice that helped me to recognise the reality and re-think how I organised my filing cabinet was this: "don't construct a filing system but rather a finding system". In other words we need to think about how our own minds work in order to think about how we might re-find information at a later time. So I began to ask myself: where am I likely to look if I want to re-find this? I recognised that, quiet often, I work by visual memory (whereabouts I might put something) and by my own classification system. So I grouped things according to semantic groupings that meant something to me and had the labels on the files in different positions so that a visual element was introduced.

I'd suggest trying it yourself, if you don't already.
Of course, this means that some of us also need to ask a further question: "Do I really think that I'm going to want to find this again? Or is this developing into an information graveyard where I respectfully bury things that I won't want to disinter?"