10 Tips for Taming That Paper

Feb 28th, 2010 | By Darlene MacAuley | Category: Creating Structure, Getting Organized, Home Office, Starting Your Biz

Image by EvelynGiggles via Flickr

In my house, paper breeds. Despite the attempts I’ve made to recycle, throw out, file and pile, paper still grows. Although I haven’t perfected the system, here are 10 tips that can help you take control of the paper in your life:

Put an end to junk mail – If you have lots of junk mail, consider signing up for services with the Direct Marketing Association or 41pounds.org and they will help decrease the volume of junk mail you receive.
Sort through your mail as soon as you bring it home. Set up a mail checking station and keep a letter opener and recycle bin handy. Open and check your mail. Dump anything that is going to recycling right away. If you pay your bills online or have an automatic bill payment set up, recycle the envelopes for those bills. When you’re done going through the mail put all the bills to be paid in a “Bills To Pay” file. For items related to business, put them in a “Business Mail” file to take care of when during your working hours. For the rest, either take action on the rest of the mail, or create a basket or bin to take action later. You may want to schedule a regular time to handle this mail.
Revamp your filing system. Create a simple filing system for yourself, and only keep items that are necessary. Develop a system to box up papers at the end of each year or after you’ve filed your taxes, so they don’t overrun your office.
For magazines, if you must save an article, store them in a 3-ring binder in individual page protectors. Label the binders by topic or use large binders with subject dividers. Alternatively, you can also scan the articles so you’ll have an electronic copy. Recycle the magazines!
For children’s art projects, it’s so hard to choose what to keep and what to throw away. A friend of mine takes pictures of her kids with their creations to preserve the memories of the treasures. After a period of time, the projects and pictures are discarded. For pictures you could scan them.
If you use your printer a lot, consider having a tray where you can save one sided copies that aren’t used. They make great note paper, drawing paper for the kids, or you can use the blank side through the printer again.
Spend a few minutes every day going through new paperwork. Handle a piece of paper as few times as possible. As much as possible, do what needs to be done with it, then file or recycle it. If you can’t work on something right now, write down what needs to be done on a post-it note and put it on that sheet to remind you immediately what needs to be done. Keep a file on or near your desk for these items that must be taken care of. If there’s a deadline for it, be sure to add a reminder to your calendar.
For invitations and notes about events that go on a calendar, I add it to my outlook right away and recycle or file the paper. If it’s an invitation, I tack it to a bulletin board so I can grab it on the way to the event.
Go paperless as much as possible. With the internet at our fingertips, it’s so easy to set up automatic bill pay and have our bank and credit card statements sent to us via email. If you use a program such as Quicken or Quickbooks to manage your accounts for home or business, you’ll find that you’ll save time by downloading transactions and automatic online reconciliation of your accounts.
For anything that is tax deductible, create a file to manage all of those transactions. Anytime you receive a receipt for a charitable deduction or other deductible transactions, you can easily keep these papers in a file that will be ready for you to go through at tax time.

For more help with getting organized, Julie Morgenstern has a book called “Organizing from the Inside Out”. Another great online resource for organizing in bite-sized chunks is Flylady. She has a website and a Yahoo Group that sends you reminders to help you in “baby steps” to get control of your clutter, paper or otherwise!

Please share your organizational tips with us!