Paper: Lasting Organization
January is often a month of paper overwhelm. Holiday receipts, tax docs, catalogs, warranties, holiday cards, bills, and year-end statements have all poured into our homes and added literal inches to the piles we already had. Contributing to the confusion, many of us have scooped those piles of paper into bags or bins and stuffed them somewhere, anywhere to make room for holiday festivities. What to do? Where to start?
Welcome to my new series of blog posts where I take a topic and explain the three essential stages to achieve lasting organization. The first stage is to CATCH UP quickly so we don't lose motivation. The second stage defines the habits and solutions to KEEP UP and prevent clutter from coming back. The final set involves changes we put in place to STAY AHEAD of disorganization for good. No more back sliding into chaos. The first topic this year is PAPER.
Catch Up
The Catch Up stage is about getting through the piles and making decisions as quickly as possible. If we get bogged down here or become sidetracked, we will find ourselves exhausted and in a more disorganized space. Not where we want to be! The goal here is to use shortcuts to remove as much clutter as quickly as possible while making more effective decisions. To get started:
Gather the paper together. Get a clothes basket and find all the piles and bags of bills and bring them together to a place with enough room to sort. An empty dining room table is ideal, or set up a card table or put down a blanket to sort on the floor in an out-of-the-way space. Don’t try to sort paper on the kitchen table because if you run out of time, you scoop everything up so your family can eat dinner and you will have lost all progress!
Don’t read, sort! I watch clients process paper in this stage and they often do the same thing. They pick up the top piece of paper and start reading and deliberating. Here’s the math - if you have 200 pieces of paper (the same size as a package of printer paper) and you spend 2 minutes deliberating on each piece of paper, that would be over 6 hours of work. No one wants to spend 6 hours reading unless it’s a good book. Instead, imagine you are dealing cards and sorting paper into mini-piles of very specific types of paper. Try to spend only a few seconds on each piece of paper. Sorting categories could be Receipts, Bills, School, Warranties, Taxes, Recipes, Things I Meant to Read, or Notes I’ve written to myself. The secret sauce here is that we make better, faster decisions when our brain can focus on one category at a time. I always do this when I work with a client because I've found that people can fly through decisions when they are focused on one category, especially when we start with a category that’s easier like Receipts or Warranties.
Meta Decisions Make decisions about how to decide. It’s more efficient if we make a decision one time and then act on that decision all the time. Before working on each pile, define what you need to keep out of that pile. For example, you may decide to keep all receipts for one year or you may decide to only keep business receipts. Now as you go through the pile, you are only looking for what to keep, making it easier to discard everything else. I had a client make a decision to only keep trade journals printed within the last two years. Based on that one decision, I sorted out older trade journals and recycled a 3-foot-tall pile of journals. One decision resulted in a 3 feet reduction in paper!
Keep Up
Now that we’ve eliminated clutter and are only dealing with what we NEED to keep, we can focus on the habits and solutions that work together to keep us organized. Having these systems in place gives us confidence that even if we have a busy week and the house looks disorganized, we have the skills and tools to find our way back to an organized state. The best solutions will be unique to you but some possibilities are:
Make it a priority to toss or shred unnecessary paper immediately so that only important paper lives in your home or office.
Keep reference paper or memorabilia separate from action paper. Don’t have prior year tax forms eating up valuable storage space in your primary work area.
Busy families benefit from keeping HOME, SCHOOL, and WORK papers separate. Once these categories mix together, it's a lot of work to unmix them. Unique containers or locations and color coding are ways to keep separation.
Digitize the information and toss the paper. Add information as a to-do in your task list/app or add an event date and details to your digital calendar. Keeping paper to serve as a reminder often means that the reminder gets buried under other paper.
Batch similar actions to make the best use of your time. Group all bills together in a basket or file box and process them weekly. We are much more efficient when we batch similar tasks than if we tried to do the same tasks individually.
Stay Ahead
The piles of paper are gone and the new habits are working to keep them away. You can find what you are looking for when you need to find it. Yay! In this final stage, we are looking to make our systems even easier to maintain. Invest the extra space, time, and focus gained from the first two steps to ensure that clutter doesn't sneak back in when life gets busy or changes. For example, we can reduce the future volume of paper by turning off junk mail or setting up automatic payments. We can improve our digital organization skills to eliminate paper. Confidence in a digital calendar, task manager, or password manager allows us to let go of paper serving as a visual reminder to do something. Future you will be able to accomplish more with less paper.