I moved to a new office. My old office had only one filing cabinet with only two drawers and, notably, it was absent of any file folders. It was just a deep drawer. I stuffed all the papers, newsletters, documents, and anything else that I wanted to keep inside, creating a pile of documents in no particular order in the bottom of this filing cabinet.

Looking back, I now realize I made a mistake. I often had to ruffle through everything from top to bottom to find anything that I need it. I thought this was the way that everyone kept their files, just sitting in the bottom of a drawer waiting to be ruffled through whenever something was needed.

This changed when I moved my things into the new office. It had many more filing cabinets. At first, I didn’t know what I was going to do with all of this extra space. Afterall, my usual pile fit very comfortably in just one drawer, with only mild spillage.

As I began to examine these new drawers, I saw they had some file folders in them already. Seeing these folders made me wonder if maybe files weren't just something to be shoved into the bottom of a drawer. Maybe it could be useful for me to take some of the things from my pile and put them in these file folders inside the filing cabinets.

Quite a novel idea, right?

So, I did. I took my pile and organized each document by its subject. I kept the things that I wanted to preserve in a file folder clearly labeled by what each item was. It didn't even take a full day before I realized how much easier it was to find my files. Instead of spending five minutes going through countless papers to find one file, it now took only seconds.

I came home that night after discovering this ease and told my wife that she, too, should consider putting her pile of documents into a filing cabinet. She laughed at me. It was in that moment that I realized I was the only one with a pile in my office drawer. I realized I probably should have utilized file folders in my filing cabinets a long time ago.

Even though I used filing cabinets wrong for so long, I am glad I’m using them correctly now. Sometimes we all make mistakes, and we do things the hard way because it's just the way we think it should be done, but it's important for us to reexamine our lives and see what we can do differently for the better. Is there something simple that you can do, with just a little bit of effort, to improve your life? Take the pile out of your drawer, organize it, and see what you have been missing.