Invite Opportunity in by Organizing Your Paper Clutter (Part 1)

“Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

~Albert Einstein

We all have it. Piles of paper that cover our desks and tables, take up precious counter space, and make our file cabinets burst at the seams. We even have the front of our fridges cluttered with reminders, kids’ art, lists, etc, held up with unseemly pizza magnets we’ve gathered over the years.

What choice do we have? Who has time to go organize the heaps of paper clutter that come through our door each and every day?

Don’t worry. In this series of posts I’m going to help you use the S.O.S. system to get rid of your paper headache once and for all.

This post is going to concentrate on the first step of the system. Simplify. This is the most difficult, and can be the most time-consuming, step—depending on the state of your paper clutter. That’s why it’s first! Once you’re done this step things just keep getting better.

One of the things that the majority of people find most challenging about dealing with clutter is facing not only what’s coming into their homes on a daily basis, but also what has already accumulated. That is why our first step in dealing with any kind of clutter is to simplify what we already have. This means purging and getting rid of what we no longer need!

The bad new is, we inevitably need to keep some of the paper that comes through our doors. There are many important documents and precious memories that we need and/or want to store. That’s precisely why we can’t make any improvements to our “paper routine” until we confront what’s already in front of us.

By the way, if you’d like to find out more about organizing the myriad of paper that your children bring home from school or that collects in the form of children’s art work, make sure you’ve signed up for my FREE updates and tips so you don’t miss anything. Not only will you learn how to apply the S.O.S. system to your kids’ clutter, but you’ll also gain the tools to teach them how to effectively deal with their own paper clutter!

The good news is, although we’ll most likely always have incoming papers, we do not have to accept paper clutter as part of our lives.

The important part of the simplifying process is to do it in small steps. Don’t dump a pile of papers on the floor with the noble intention of sorting through it, when realistically it will take you more time than you have. Who has a whole day to devote to decluttering papers?

For example, if you’re trying to deal with a file cabinet that can no longer hold your most recent phone bill, ask yourself, “How much time am I willing to dedicate to this job right now?” If the answer is only 30 minutes, then set a timer for 30 minutes and go! Don’t stress if your job isn’t complete at the end of the time—just make a date to continue what you’ve started another time.

Another approach would be to tackle the job in chunks. So with the file cabinet example, you may want to declutter just one file a day, so as not to get overwhelmed.

Concentrate on what you have accomplished, not what you still need to do.

Obviously there is more to the simplifying process than files. You may have boxes of papers that are taking up valuable space, a specific room (i.e. home office) that is full of unorganized paper or even piles of paper on flat surfaces of your home. Whatever the case may be, use this step to get rid of what you don’t need.

Before sorting through your papers, be sure to have prepared a place for everything:

• a display center for children’s artwork (if applicable)
• a place to keep papers that need to be dealt with (a basket or container with slots)
• a garbage pail and/or shredder (for non-recyclables or sensitive papers)
• a recycling bin (for recyclable papers that aren’t sensitive)
• a simple filing system such as a filing cabinet or accordion file case

Keep everything close together so that as soon as you bring your mail in for the day you can bring it straight to your sorting area to be put in one of the six prepared places above. We’ll be getting more in depth about the routine of dealing with mail and other incoming paper in posts dealing with step 2 (organizing) and step 3 (streamlining).

If you have any magazines lying around that are older than 2 months or newspapers that are older than a day, recycle them. In the media world, they’re yesterday’s news! Also, be sure to go through your catalogs and recycle those that have expired.

Be careful when you’re going through your existing paper clutter that you don’t get sidetracked and start paying bills or reading letters. Put those in your paper center to be dealt with at another time. You should have a place to put things that need to be taken care of—this will be ongoing. However, don’t fall into the trap of making a “sort it later” pile. Put everything in its place!

Just remember what I call the “S.O.S. 10% rule.” When you are decluttering any area, you should always leave extra room (here’s where the 10% comes in) for new stuff that will be incoming. To use the filing example, you don’t want each file or section to be overflowing–you want to leave space for the incoming.

It may be time to reconsider what you’re keeping or perhaps create a new file for particularly busy folders (like important receipts) if things are starting to overflow.

In my next post in this series, you’ll learn how to organize your paper clutter in such a way that you’ll never have to “paper purge” again! Do you have any tips or tricks to add for purging paper clutter?

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Related posts:

1. Virtual Paper Clutter: Organizing Your Computer
2. Organize Your Paper Clutter (Part 2)
3. Beat Your Procrastination by Releasing Your Clutter