Peace of Mind Organizing

Hunkered in? Do some filing!

13 January 2017

Much of the U.S. is dealing with some lousy winter weather today. Here in St. Louis, a two-day ice storm is forecast and both the national weather service and the state transportation division have instructed people to stay off the roads. I’m not going anywhere. Seems like a perfect weekend to catch up on a few things.

Are you one of the millions staying in this weekend? And is there a pile of papers in your house somewhere waiting to be filed? Here’s my challenge to you: Set a timer for 10 minutes and start filing! If that pile’s been there awhile, I bet a lot of the paper will have aged out. Throw away as much of it as you can. I’d be willing to bet that in ten minutes you’ll make a nice dent.

And you’ll never know what you might find in the pile. In 2015 I finally tackled a pile that I’d put on top of a filing cabinet because I needed to make files for them. (Bad organizer!) In that pile I found my grandfather’s birth certificate. That may not sound like such a big deal, but I’m a genealogy researcher and for a number of years I’d been trying to solve the mystery of where my grandfather was born in 1904. The answer was sitting my house the whole time.

Between this past Christmas and New Year’s, I tackled a really old pile of papers that had been mocking me in my office for literally years. There were no treasures there, beyond some nice handwritten notes from people. (I filed them in my Kudos file.) I think it took less than a half hour to process all that paper because I was able to throw so much of it away.

I have a pile of household papers needing attention in a different office in our house. I’m going to see how much progress I can make on it ten minutes at a time and I’ll post here how long it took. That’s a picture of the pile at the top of the blog post.

There’s no better time than now to eliminate or reduce that pile!

ETA: I did address the pile pictured above, and after three 30-minute spurts, it’s gone!

Tagged with: paper management, paper piles, pockets of time, timer

Comments