Are Your Paper Piles Stressing You Out?
Even if you try to live a paperless life, mail and papers just keep coming into your home. Important papers from work and school tend to land on the kitchen counter or your office desk and the mail piles up until you have the time go through it all. Sound familiar? The reality is that we can never truly go “paperless”. We still have to save important documents and our kids will always have some form of paper they need for school or activities.
Don’t let your paper piles clutter up your life!
These are my best paper organizing tips to help you get started on tackling your paper clutter:
Check your mail every day. You don’t have to open every single envelope, but quickly check to see if there’s anything you can toss right away, like the advertisements and flyers. You don’t need them, I promise! If you were interested in changing your internet provider, you would do a quick search online, not check your pile of flyers to find a new company.
Put the rest of the mail and any papers that come into your home in a pretty basket, bin, or file folder to be sorted at the end of the week.
The most important step to paper organization!: Pick a day and time each week to go through the paper pile, and be consistent! If you don’t set a date to do this, your papers will continue to pile up. I go through all my mail on Sunday mornings while I drink my coffee. If done consistently, it will only take you a few minutes.
Sort your papers into 2 categories: active papers and reference papers. Active papers are forms that need to be filled out, bills that need to be paid, phone calls to be made, etc. Reference papers are school or activity calendars, insurance documents, tax documents, or other papers that would be difficult to replace or aren’t easily found online.
Start with your active papers. Fill out any forms and pay any bills you need to take care of. While you’re at it, create an online account with each bill you pay, change your settings to paperless, and set up auto-pay if possible. Add any phone calls you need to make or errands you need to run to your calendar for the week so you don’t forget.
Tackle your reference papers. I seriously want you to ditch the filing cabinet, but if you already have one that you actually use, then go ahead and file any important documents. Consider organizing your paper in binders, instead of the filing cabinet. Binders allow you to easily retrieve the papers you need. They are also portable, in case of an emergency.
You don’'t have to organize your entire backlog of paper in one sitting. Instead, set a timer for 15 minutes each week and go through as much as you can. You will probably find that most of the papers you are saving are actually junk mail and can be tossed or recycled.
Paper organization can be overwhelming at times, but it doesn’t have it to be. Use these paper organizing steps to keep your paper clutter under control.
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