Color coding is a highly effective organizational approach. It maximizes clarity by using simple, visual strategies. Using a few affordable office supplies, anyone can create a color-coding planner or organization framework that simplifies their daily routine and powers better, more effective work.
Color-Coding Planners in Action
Smart professionals around the world use color coding to tackle some of their biggest organizational challenges and responsibilities. From the C-suite to the workaday office worker, every professional’s daily life can be supported, enhanced, streamlined, and clarified using color coding.
A Colorful Fact
Color is tied directly to efficient thinking, language, and vocabulary acquisition within our brains, which means when workers, teams, and businesses embrace color coding, they’re setting themselves up to work better and achieve more.
These three high-stakes fields where organized minds have revolutionized their work by developing a color-coding system for planners and creating the most common color-coding filing systems: education, project management, and medical offices.
Color-Coded Classrooms
For teachers, color coding provides both internal organization and a clear, straightforward language to use with both students and parents. Regardless of subject area or grade level, creating a color-coded classroom facilitates better teaching, learning, and paraprofessional support through organization. Color provides natural, easy-to-remember jumping-off points for student and teacher desk organization ideas, organizing teacher supplies, scheduling, and even simple formative assessments.
Using a color-coded planner, elementary school teachers can block out their lessons and schedule time for each subject area throughout the day in a highly visual manner. This helps teachers balance the pace of each unit and become more aware of the workload they are creating for themselves and their students.
Many primary school teachers extend their use of color-coded organization to students as well. Teachers can color code handouts and notes home to clarify their purpose and make them stand out in backpacks or folders, or use a color-coded folder system to help students and parents remember which documents are the highest priority.
When it comes to middle school, color coding provides teachers with opportunities to manage their workload more effectively. Color coding also models strong organizational skills for students who need assistance with executive function or strategizing for success. Instructors who teach multiple sections of the same class or several different courses throughout the day often use a color-coding planner to guide their lesson planning and overcome the logistical challenge of managing so many papers and assessments.
Just like their elementary school colleagues, high school teachers can use their own color-coded classroom organizational systems to make content and assignments more accessible and easier for students to remember. By color coding assignments in consistent ways, teachers can help students manage their homework load more effectively, reduce the “I forgot about that!” gap between home and school, and teach students strategies they can extend to other areas in their lives.
Color Psychology: What and How?
Color psychology is the idea that certain colors have a direct impact on our feelings and moods. They also come with meaning depending on geography – “For example, while the color white is used in many Western countries to represent purity and innocence, it is seen as a symbol of mourning in many Eastern countries.”
For those of us in the Western hemisphere, there are certain colors we associate with certain things. Be sensitive to this when color-coding your files or space. Don’t use red for something positive; use it instead for items that need attention, or something similar. Don’t use green for something negative; use it for completed or on-track tasks.
Also, avoid using similar colors for things that shouldn’t be confused, like using red versus orange to color code paid invoices and overdue invoices.
Be smart with your colors!
To read more about color psychology, check out our piece on it.
Project Management Color Coding
In the world of project management, great organization is the difference between assured success and probable failure. Managers are tasked with leading teams of assets who are increasingly far-flung, and each of those assets has numerous responsibilities that directly connect to project success. Without the right system, it can seem overwhelming.
Color coding makes that massive task less intimidating by creating a way of looking at each project that focuses on each individual part of the project in a systematic way without getting bogged down in the whole. Using a color-coding planner, managers can create color designations for each aspect of the project, team member, or deadline and use those colors consistently throughout the project to provide clarity for everyone involved.
For managers balancing multiple projects at once, color coding is one of the best possible ways to stay organized and prevent projects, tasks, and deadlines from blurring into each other. This reduces both physical and mental clutter, promoting clearer thinking and better work.
When it’s time for that project manager to report to leadership, color coding simplifies reports and progress updates at a glance. For example, project managers can code the project’s overall progress as red, yellow, or green depending on their assessment, with individual color-coded ratings for each division, asset, or deadline within the scope.
If a project manager ever needs to illustrate a concern, explain a hang-up, or advocate for their team, color-coded documentation creates authoritative, meaningful artifacts to share with others and get the point across. In this way, color-coded organization truly supports the project management process from top to bottom, serving as both a guiding light and a key communication tool.
Medical Records Color Coding
Medical records have been color-coded nearly as long as we’ve been keeping them. That’s because providing and documenting medical care has always required high levels of both organization and accessibility.
Today, nearly every hospital, medical facility, and family doctor’s office around the country has a color-coding system in place. But no two systems are exactly alike, and each is designed to meet the specific needs and challenges of its medical practice.
For doctors with a few hundred patients, shelves of alternating, brightly colored file folders are often visible behind reception counters. For major hospitals and HMOs, each patient record is itself a color-coded planner of appointments, tests, and notes. In both situations, the goal is the same: create an organizational framework that maximizes accessibility and minimizes confusion when it’s time to connect with vitally important information.
Inside the typical doctor’s office, color coding is used for much more than just patient records. When schedulers fill in appointments, they often color code with appointment types or patient history information so the doctor can prepare for the appointment at a glance and create a quick visual overview of their day.
Doctors rely on both physical and digital color-coding planners to keep them on top of their daily schedules and help them balance patient consultations, planned procedures, and other professional responsibilities. Clear and consistent use of color coding also helps doctors and nursesprevent medication errors, identify and share patient risk factors quickly, and provide more immediate, responsive care.
Doctors, nurses, and pharmacists frequently use color coding in their patient teaching practicesas well. When a patient is beginning a course of treatment or starting a new prescription, their care team will often provide them with or show them how to create color-coded resourcesthat simplify scheduling medication times, ensure patients understand what they’re taking and how to take it, and build long-term health and wellness routines.
Building Your Own Color-Coded System
If all these examples of color-coding planners and organizational frameworks have you eager to get your own system in place, be sure you consider what you want your setup to look like before you go out and start purchasing.
Your color-coded system’s final look and feel will in part be determined by how you prefer to store and access documents. The first question you should be asking yourself is what kind of folders you’re going to use.
Pocket Folders
We’ve been using pocket folders since school and they still have a lot to offer adults in terms of color coding. Pocket folders are great for short-term storage or transportation of important information, and they’re cheap and available in a whole rainbow of colors to support a personal or professional organization system.
In fact, if you combine a color-coding daily planner with color-coded pocket folders, you can turn your backpack or work bag into an on-the-go office that allows you to work on whatever tasks, goals, or responsibilities you’re managing in a thoughtful, organized way.
Color coded pocket folders are a great solution for professionals whose jobs require them to travel back-and-forth between two or more facilities. For example, if a teacher’s aide is responsible for supporting students in two different buildings throughout the day, scheduling and homework information for the students from one building could be kept in navy blue pocket folders, while the documentation for the students at the other school could be stored in brown two pocket folders. This significantly reduces the time spent by the aide digging for papers, creating additional time for meaningful student support.
This color-coding strategy can also be extended to the aide’s daily planner, making it easier to remember with whom they are working in which building during any given point in the day.
With that said, pocket folders have clear limitations. For one, documents can fall out of pockets and pages can become misplaced or disordered nearly any time someone accesses, moves, reviews, or adds to the file. If you’re looking for a long-term, professional-level color coding system, you might need to consider some stronger solutions.
Tools of the Trade
We like to focus on filing when it comes to color-coding your organization, but don’t limit yourself to just folders! Plenty of other colorful resources are great for color-coding, planning, and organizing. Here are some of our favorites.
- Highlighters. Make your notes easy to reference with bright, multicolored highlighters.
- Binder clips. Keep papers in place and organized with color-coded binder clips.
- Dry erase markers. Just like highlighters, breaking information up by color can be a helpful, quick way to visually organize information.
- Sticky tabs and post it notes. Tab out relevant info and keep track of important notes with colorful sticky tabs and notes.
- Wall file organizer Keep your documents close at hand and save space with these mesh wall-mounted file organizers.
Classification & Partition Folders
Classification and partition folders provide a step up in security from pocket folders, as they’re designed to keep documents organized and in order, which means dropping one or more on the floor won’t result in disaster. Internal dividers separate different sections and documents can be fastened directly into the folder for secure storage and quick review.
While classification and partition folders are available in a variety of colors, you can also add color-coding tabs to their dividers to create a second layer of organization. For example, each of your red partition folders might represent an individual client in a legal firm, with differently colored divider tabs representing different types of contracts or consultations with that client over time.
On the other hand, those same red classification folders are perfect in a project management scenario, where each section of the folder can be allocated for a different segment, aspect, or goal within the project, creating an on-the-go management overview that can easily travel to meetings. By color coding each section or document type within the file, managers can highlight particular takeaways or draw attention to key metrics in a way that’s visually clear.
Classification and partition folders are great for maintaining ongoing records and creating color-coding planners because they contain a single, self-contained source of truth that can be richly documented and annotated without excessive storage needs.
Hanging File Folders
A couple of decades ago, you couldn’t find a home or business office that didn’t have at least one hanging file cabinet in it. Although most businesses are going digital, legal size colored file folders still provide some of the best available color coding and planning tools.
Hanging file folders with built-in tabs offer a balance of the grab-and-go functionality of pocket folders and the long-term storage capabilities of classification and partition folders. The possibilities for organizational systems with durable file folders are nearly endless, as differently colored hanging folders, labeling tabs, and even drawers can be used to organize files according to the system of your choice.
Unlike pocket or partition folders, hanging file folders have a natural permanent home: in the hanging file cabinet. That means they’re designed with neatness and aesthetics in mind.
No matter your job, responsibilities, or work style, there’s a color-coding planner or organization system out there for you. Discovering the perfect setup for color coding your planner or filling system just requires a little inspiration, a little planning, and a little experimentation. Remember: organization is a commitment, not just a goal.
What do you think about color coding? Let us know! Reach out on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook with your thoughts on the best color schemes for the workplace. And if you have any questions or concerns, send us an email - Larry is always happy to hear from you!
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