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Some of the things Let Go of Clutter (hey, I need an amazon link kickback here) says about paper.
Difficulty
Paper is worse to go through than other clutter. (I knew this but wouldn't have been able to say why.) "Fear of regret is one thing," says author Harriet Schechter, "but fear of the IRS can be worse." Plus there's a lot of it in a small space. A shoebox worth of paper contains many times more decisions to make and, if there are receipts in there, more worry about what you have to keep, than a shoebox worth of just about any other stuff. Going through a foot-high stack of paper at four seconds apiece could take an hour or more. Pound for pound, foot for foot, paper is the densest kind of clutter.
Are my piles of paper serving a purpose? Something useful, like keeping my desk warm in winter? Heh, I just loved that question and so had to add it in here. It made me laugh. My desk is the coziest desk in Christendom. If I'm in something I could technically call Christendom. OK, it's the coziest desk west of someplace east of here.
Kinds of Piles
I LOVED this section. I knew all of this and couldn't, before reading this book, put it into words. There are five kinds of piles. I shall paraphrase, in an attempt to avoid blatant plagiary.
- Growing. You keep putting stuff on it: unopened mail, bills to pay, bills that you've paid...
- Stagnant. You shoved it in a box because someone was coming over.
- Diminishing. You're dealing with it! But you leave...
- Distilled. The stuff you really, truly don't know what to do with.
- Double-Distilled. An aggregate of multiple previously-sorted Distilled piles.
Holy moly have I ever had these kinds of piles of paper. Every single one of them. She nailed it. Right on the nose. I'm in awe.
A Distilled pile (or any papers lying around, I suppose) the author calls "Pile Germs": left unmolested, they grow into a pile of papers. I love it. Pile Germs. They breed, I tell you. These are all over my house. No wonder I'm swimming in a sea of paper. In this room alone I have nineteen file cabinet drawers (some of them actually used for filing... hmm, twelve) and I still have piles of homeless papers keeping my furniture warm in the winter.
Records vs. Resources
Papers are either records (of what you did, when, how much you paid for it, etc) or resources (information about what you MIGHT do someday, for example). Records are finite. Resources can drown you. Pitch more Resources. You can get most of those again.
She goes through some suggestions about how long you have to keep various kinds of records and how you could organize them. Me, I don't care (yet). Even if I keep them all, but pitch the business card of somebody I saw at a craft fair ten years ago and can't remember what he sold, I'll be doing so much better than I'm doing now...!
Managing it
There's project time (fighting a full-grown clutter monster) and maintenance time (not letting him get in your house in the first place). The more you pitch, the less of both you need to spend.
To keep control of your paper clutter, the author recommends three systems:
- Time management system: mainly so that you can allocate time for maintenance tasks
- Paper Flow: be efficient with your handling of stuff that comes in (eg: sort your mail next to a wastebasket)
- Filing system: a sensible way to keep the things you need to keep
She goes into detail on how to plan out a good, usable filing system. I think mine's OK so what she said didn't impact me much. One thing I hadn't thought of before is that all the files don't have to be in the same place. Consider putting them where you use them, even if that's a kitchen minifile with coupons and recipes and takeout menus and appliance instructions.
Wow, there's a lot about paper. More on next rock.
Difficulty
Paper is worse to go through than other clutter. (I knew this but wouldn't have been able to say why.) "Fear of regret is one thing," says author Harriet Schechter, "but fear of the IRS can be worse." Plus there's a lot of it in a small space. A shoebox worth of paper contains many times more decisions to make and, if there are receipts in there, more worry about what you have to keep, than a shoebox worth of just about any other stuff. Going through a foot-high stack of paper at four seconds apiece could take an hour or more. Pound for pound, foot for foot, paper is the densest kind of clutter.
Are my piles of paper serving a purpose? Something useful, like keeping my desk warm in winter? Heh, I just loved that question and so had to add it in here. It made me laugh. My desk is the coziest desk in Christendom. If I'm in something I could technically call Christendom. OK, it's the coziest desk west of someplace east of here.
Kinds of Piles
I LOVED this section. I knew all of this and couldn't, before reading this book, put it into words. There are five kinds of piles. I shall paraphrase, in an attempt to avoid blatant plagiary.
- Growing. You keep putting stuff on it: unopened mail, bills to pay, bills that you've paid...
- Stagnant. You shoved it in a box because someone was coming over.
- Diminishing. You're dealing with it! But you leave...
- Distilled. The stuff you really, truly don't know what to do with.
- Double-Distilled. An aggregate of multiple previously-sorted Distilled piles.
Holy moly have I ever had these kinds of piles of paper. Every single one of them. She nailed it. Right on the nose. I'm in awe.
A Distilled pile (or any papers lying around, I suppose) the author calls "Pile Germs": left unmolested, they grow into a pile of papers. I love it. Pile Germs. They breed, I tell you. These are all over my house. No wonder I'm swimming in a sea of paper. In this room alone I have nineteen file cabinet drawers (some of them actually used for filing... hmm, twelve) and I still have piles of homeless papers keeping my furniture warm in the winter.
Records vs. Resources
Papers are either records (of what you did, when, how much you paid for it, etc) or resources (information about what you MIGHT do someday, for example). Records are finite. Resources can drown you. Pitch more Resources. You can get most of those again.
She goes through some suggestions about how long you have to keep various kinds of records and how you could organize them. Me, I don't care (yet). Even if I keep them all, but pitch the business card of somebody I saw at a craft fair ten years ago and can't remember what he sold, I'll be doing so much better than I'm doing now...!
Managing it
There's project time (fighting a full-grown clutter monster) and maintenance time (not letting him get in your house in the first place). The more you pitch, the less of both you need to spend.
To keep control of your paper clutter, the author recommends three systems:
- Time management system: mainly so that you can allocate time for maintenance tasks
- Paper Flow: be efficient with your handling of stuff that comes in (eg: sort your mail next to a wastebasket)
- Filing system: a sensible way to keep the things you need to keep
She goes into detail on how to plan out a good, usable filing system. I think mine's OK so what she said didn't impact me much. One thing I hadn't thought of before is that all the files don't have to be in the same place. Consider putting them where you use them, even if that's a kitchen minifile with coupons and recipes and takeout menus and appliance instructions.
Wow, there's a lot about paper. More on next rock.
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