Halt the Paper Pile-Up

There's no doubt, we're all inundated with paper on a daily basis. Even if you use technology such as your computer or a PDA (personal digital assistant) to help reduce it, you're still living in a world that is paper- heavy.

Just between the mailman bringing mail to your door, paperwork brought home from school and work, contractor agreements, medical forms and so on, paper piles around the world continue to grow.

Here are five ideas to help you halt the paper pile-up in your world.

1. Corral the paper clutter.
   The problem often starts small. Jack brings the mail in the door and leaves it on the coffee table. Jill puts the insurance forms she has to fill out for work on the kitchen table. Jane comes home from school and drops her permission slips on the home office desk. Jeff flings his college applications on the living room coffee table. In just a few days, paper piles are forming all over the house!
   
   Contain this problem by designating one place where all paper is handled. Have a wire basket for each family member in one room. When a paper can't be read or attended to immediately, at least it can be placed in an assigned wire basket for a day or two, where it's not going to be lost.
2. Handle paper daily.
   Handle your papers within a day or two, and you'll be able to keep them under control. Wait a week or more, and you'll be drowning in a flood of paper!
   
   Go through your mail on a daily basis, immediately recycling anything you don't need, and putting all important papers into their designated homes (e.g. pending bills in the bill paying binder, bank statements in your filing system, etc.)
   
   Go through your in box once per day, and empty it out each night before you leave the office.
   
   Read at least one item in your To Read file each day to keep it under control. Then, immediately file, or recycle, those papers.
   
   Don't let your To File papers pile up. If you have a sheet of paper to file, file it in your file cabinet right away. Don't first put it in a To File tray, and then file it later after lots of papers begin to grow. It will only take a second to file one or two sheets of paper now, but if you allow it to grow, it's going to require quite a bit of time. That's one of the main reasons people hate to file. They allow it to pile up until it's out of control.
3. Don't print everything.
   You would think because more people have computers these days, that the paper clutter has been reduced. No chance of that. It has immensely multiplied!
   
   One of the reasons for that is that people are printing things that don't have to be printed.
   
   One person I know was complaining he didn't have enough room in his filing cabinet for his important papers. I then found out he was printing every single e-mail he received. When I asked him why, he said that he might want to reference one of those e-mails someday.
   
   Let's put this in perspective. He gets around 20 e-mails each day, prints each of them and puts them in his filing cabinet.
   
   Twenty e-mails times 365 days per year equals a minimum of 7,300 sheets of paper annually. That's almost 15 reams of paper in his filing cabinet. No wonder he has no room for his important papers!
   
   Upon further exploration, I found out that he hasn't referenced even one of those e-mails in months. When I looked at the types of e-mail, it was over 70 percent jokes and funny stories that friends had sent him over the Internet.
   
   Wow. Let me assure you that 95 percent of the e-mail most people read on a daily basis can be immediately responded to and deleted. The rest of it can be temporarily stored in e-mail folders until you're ready to handle it.
   
   As a rule of thumb, don't print out your e-mail. I print less than 1 percent of the e-mail I receive on a daily basis--only very important documents that would be detrimental to lose in case of a computer crash.
4. Eliminate scraps of paper.
   Use one binder system, such as the Get Organized Now! Easy Organizer, to hold all of the information you must keep on hand, such as phone numbers, birthdays, To Do lists, cleaning schedules, grocery lists, meal planning logs, and so on.
   
   This will eliminate lots of sticky notes, and loose sheets of paper floating around--which tend to get lost.
   
   Plus, you'll save time as you won't have to search for your important information when you need it. It will be all organized together in one place.
5. Be careful about what you're filing.
   Eighty percent of papers most people file, NEVER get looked at again, but most people are not satisfied with the amount of space they have in their filing cabinets.
   
   Ally from New York filed everything from travel brochures to recipes to decorating ideas. But, once those items were filed, she never referenced any of them. What did she end up with? A filing cabinet full of stuff just taking up space.
   
   First, before you file anything, be sure it's truly necessary to keep. In a nutshell, you only want to file papers that:

   a) you need to keep for legal or financial reasons and

   b) you are very likely to reference in the near future, that you won't be able to easily access somewhere else, such as the Internet

   For example, travel brochures tend to get outdated very quickly. If you're not planning on traveling somewhere within the next few months, don't get the travel brochures until the last minute. This way, the prices and other information will be current. You could always use the Internet in addition, and skip the paper brochure completely.

by Maria Gracia - Get Organized Now! http://www.getorganizednow.com FREE Get Organized Now! Idea-Pak and E-zine, filled with tips and ideas to help you organize your home, your office and your life, at the Get Organized Now! Web site.