New Year, Clean Workspace: A One-Hour Audit of Your Cases, Files and Contacts
You do not need a reorganisation. You need an hour, a list, and the discipline to close what is finished.
January invites grand plans. Resist them. The workspace you have is mostly fine; it has simply accumulated. Here is an hour, in fifteen-minute blocks, that leaves it in better shape than a weekend of restructuring would.
00:00 — Cases (15 minutes)
Open the cases list, sort by deadline, filter to In progress. Work down it and ask one question per case: is this actually in progress? If not, set it to Completed, On hold or Cancelled — and fill the result. The board view makes this fast: drag cards between status columns. Do not touch anything else. The goal is an honest list, not a tidy one.
00:15 — Tasks (15 minutes)
Open the calendar in Agenda view with only the Tasks layer on. Overdue tasks fall into three groups: done but not ticked (tick them), no longer relevant (delete them), and genuinely late (give them a real date). A task with a date in the past that you are not going to do today is a lie you tell yourself.
00:30 — Files (15 minutes)
File Explorer, sorted by upload date, oldest first. Two habits fix most file mess: link anything sitting loose to the case it belongs to, and archive anything whose case is closed. Archived files stay searchable and downloadable; they just stop cluttering the working view. Check the storage meter while you are there — Free plans have a hard ceiling and it is better to know in January than in a rush.
00:45 — Contacts (15 minutes)
Sort contacts by last activity. The ones with no case in two years and no label are candidates for review — under your retention policy, some should go, and some should get a "Former client" label so they are filtered out of day-to-day pickers. Merge obvious duplicates. Star the email addresses that should actually receive correspondence; unstar the ones that bounced.
The one thing not to do
Do not redesign templates today. Template changes are worth making, but they deserve their own session with a clear head and a specific problem. An audit hour that turns into a template rebuild ends with neither done.
Set a reminder for the first working day of April and do it again. An hour a quarter keeps the workspace honest; a weekend a year never happens.
