Remember when it was touted that computers would make us a paperless society? Ha! I don't know about you but around my place of work and at my home, keeping ourselves dug out from under the influx of paper is a never-ending task. Here are a few of the things I do to manage the paper flow.
1. Don't put the mail down--sort it directly into where it needs to go. Most of it will go directly to the recycling bag, some directly to files, and a very few to my desk to be acted upon. The thing with paper is that it grows while you sleep--you go about your business for a few days and what was a 2 inch pile has now overrun your desk, your counter tops, and every flat surface in your house.
2. Have a filing cabinet or drawer with labeled hanging folders. (No, you are not allowed to pile papers into the drawer and close the drawer. They will multiply there until you can't get the drawer open.) I have red folders for Income Tax (blood red...), yellow for insurance folders, 12 blue monthly folders, moss green folders for warranties, and bright green folders for Social Security, voter registration, employment benefits, etc.
3. The files must be cleaned out periodically. This is what I have been doing today--cleaning out my files and wondering where on earth all this paper came from. There is a fine line in determining what to keep and what to put through the shredder. I keep this year plus the previous 9 years Income Tax; if the IRS wants more than that, they'll just have to send me to prison. I keep the papers in my monthly folder for a year. Health papers are a puzzle though; what if I have to list all my doctor, dentist, and optometrist visits in my last 25 years or be denied insurance coverage? I have no idea if I went to the dermatologist in 1997. Anyway, since I have current insurance, I just keep the previous year and figure that if I ever needed to purchase insurance, they would find one way or another to either turn me down to begin with or just take my premiums and not pay my claims.
What are your best ideas for taming the paper monster??
Thought for the day:
For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service. John Burroughs
2 comments:
Best thing I ever bought was my Fujitsu ScanSnap. It's got a tiny footprint on my desktop and as I'm opening the mail I run all the documents I may want or need through and file on my hard drive.
Instant organization!
Seriously, I wish I'd done this 5 years earlier.
Good luck and I love your blog. I'm in Houston so you seem like a neighbor.
My whole approach to managing paper is the result of a happy accident. When we married, I didn't yet know my wife well enough to realize how detail-oriented she was. Since then, my strategy is to act unaware of the growing size of the mound, confident the tipping point will soon be reached, at which point my wife will hunker down before the hillock of envelopes, with me well out of the way.
For concerns even less pressing than junk mail, you might enjoy visiting http://drinksbeforedinner.com
Post a Comment