| Get Organized! Taming the Paper Pile |
| Written by Shannon Grams | |
| Monday, 26 February 2007 | |
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The paperwork of life! There always seems to be so much of it. The best way to manage your home office and all its paper is to have a system. Where does the paper come from? There are the little scraps; the till receipts from purchases; the cash machine records when you do your banking; and the envelopes that arrive in your mailbox. And don’t forget the papers that come home from work and school! Start with a plastic expanding folder with several pockets that can be labeled to hold all of your small items. Customize the sections to suit your needs. Your list may include: gas receipts; banking; lottery tickets; grocery coupons; gift receipts; store Credit Notes; or money machine receipts. Have a section labeled ‘Hold,’ where you can stash a receipt until you decide it’s trash. Review the contents frequently and eliminate any paper once it’s no longer useful. For larger paper, create short-and long-term filing. Open your mail and toss all of the inserts, and the envelope that came with it, into your recycle bin. Review what is remaining by sorting it into a series of baskets and labeling the basket with the action required. For example, you can use the labels: READ/TO DO/PAY BILLS/etc. Once you have read the newsletter, recycle it. Once you have written the appointment in your daytimer, toss that paper too. Pay the bill and then file the bill. It should be your goal to empty the short-term paper bins often. Long-term filing of paper has to be a convenient, workable system for you. There are a variety of cabinets, boxes, and bins available for purchase. Go online and see what is available. You’ll be inspired! Go buy the necessary supplies to create your system. Create a series of folders for each of the categories you require and label each folder. Label the first folder in your series, FILING. When you are finished with your short-term paper, you can just poke that item in there and do all of your filing later. There are papers we have to file and important things we need to keep, but do we need to keep it all? You can spend a lot of time filing your utility bills, only to throw them away at the end of the year. Ask yourself: Instead of filing this, can I just toss it in the recycle bin right now or can I get this on an E-bill? If you can cut down on the amount of paper that comes in, you can save yourself time. We end up with so much paper in our offices because of indecision. When you pick up any paper, make a decision right away. Deal with it or file it; don’t just put it into another pile. A system is only as good as the people who use it, so take your time and set it up the way you want it. Be diligent and use your system. You feel so much better once you have A Place for Everything in your home office. Shannon is an organizer extraordinaire and owner of A Place for Everything. For more information, call her at 998-8439. |
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