Horizontal filing and stacking trays are a staple in most offices.  They’re sold in all office supply stores and come in plastic, metal, and wood.  There are plain ones and fancy, attractive ones.  Because they are popular, most people assume that they are a great option for organizing papers on a desktop.  Unfortunately, those same people quickly find that trays cause more problems than they solve.

Problem 1: They are easy to overfill.  You can keep stacking papers until they start to topple over.

Problem 2: The oldest things end up buried on the bottom.  Since most often you need to deal with older papers before newer ones, it’s a problem if what you need to work on is at the bottom of a large stack.

Problem 3: You have to dig through to find what you need.  That one piece of paper that you’re looking for might be somewhere in the middle of a stack of hundreds of pages.

A better solution would be a vertical file sorter or desktop box for hanging folders.  By using folders to categorize your papers and standing them up so that they are visible, you’ll be able to quickly see what you have and find what you need, when you need it.  These vertical options also place limits on how much you can store, which will reduce the likelihood of things from getting out of control.

If you’ve tried horizontal filing or stacking trays and found them lacking, or if you’re setting up a fresh new space, try using a vertical file sorter or file box with folder instead.