Falling on floor laughing out loud (FOFLOL) reading the posts on "paper flow"! Barb Whitehead's system sounds exactly like mine! But mine is worse now! When I had a job at WIC, and an office, and file cabinets, and all kinds of officey stuff, I was actually extremely well-organized, on the (totally baseless, in practice) premise that if I was out of the office others should be able to find whatever they needed, easily, almost intuitively, or at worst by actually reading the file labels. All my binders & notebooks had an up-to-date list of what they contained right on the cover, so no one could plead that "I couldn't find anything about...". Now that I'm working at home, I just have heaps and piles and boxes, and no spirit for mucking them out properly. (I attribute this depression to the fact that I can't find my collection of breastfeeding art, and without those beautiful madonnas to inspire me I have no power to chug forward. Yeah, I know, I need to get a grip!) So about handouts from talks, conferences, etc...it's so darn easy to lose those individual pieces of paper. But then again, it's sometimes hard to decide how to categorize information from a conference that's contained in a single file or binder, because there might be lots of different topics in there, but then again I'm so visual that I'm likely to remember that that article on relactating is in that blue folder from about 4 years ago that I spilled a little coffee on the upper left corner of because I get jostled when that woman with the beautiful scarf came by and I had to go pee during the keynote address and that was the day that my car got flooded in the parking lot and I had to drive home a different way and on the way home I passed the little parade where the cows were lying down by the side of the road and........I was a lot better organized when I had a "real" office, and my "system" had to be decipherable by others. Cheered to hear that I'm not the only imperfect one out here! Cathy Bargar