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Shredding My Docs
By Jeff Zbar | September 24, 2007
OK, I’m going to come clean - right here, right now. I’m can be a paper pack rat. For someone who dwells in the digital domain, I stash a ton of paper in my home office. I have a four-drawer file cabinet stuffed with thousands of documents dating as far back as the previous millennium. It might as well be a storage shed, given how much paper is there. But every six months or so, a moment comes along when I try to change all that, when I turn to home organization (or in this case, home office organization), and lighten my load. This weekend was just one of those moments.
I grabbed my tea, warmed up the shredder, pulled up a chair and began the process of winnowing down my document detritus. It’s pretty easy, actually. The process actually began when I elected to receive many of my bills and statements (like power, water, telephone and the like) electronically. That reduced the number of paper bills I had to deal with; correspondingly, since I also pay them with my bank’s online billpay option, it reduced the time and effort spent remitting payment and the checks I have to deal with at month’s end.
Once I opened the file cabinet, I found dozens of documents I could ditch. For example, our health, home and auto insurance folders had duplicate packets outlining our coverage. I was able to ditch older versions, keeping only the latest (I made sure they were truly duplicates and no important info was tossed in the process). Before tossing, I pulled off the cover pages - and any internal pages with our personal info - and ran them through the shredder. In fact, I did that with all our documents I deemed useless. Our identity is something we should covet and protect; if we don’t, someone else will.
After about an hour, I had thrown about two office garbage cans worth of paper in the trash bin, and had a stack of papers ready for my 10-year-old daughter to shred (she loves to run them through the machine - which has a SafeShred feature that protects little fingers from getting caught in the device).
With hundreds of pages removed from my life, I feel much lighter. And eventually, I might one day be able to rid myself of that four-drawer cabinet - though I don’t think it will fit in the shredder…
Topics: Office Organization |