Tag Archives: Productivity

Welcome to Part IV of How to Organize Important Documents. You can read Part I here ,  Part II here. And Part III here.

If you’ve been following the series, you’ve taken care of all your piles and pretty much now all you have left are magazine articles, newspaper clippings, recipes and hobby/craft paperwork.

Do you think you’ll ever use them?

Be honest now.

If the answer is no, just toss them and go do something fun. No guilt, no more projects that you clearly aren’t all that interested in doing hanging over your head.

Didn’t that feel good?  Now, don’t clip out any more articles. Just find them online and pin them.  Pinterest can be your virtual bulletin board/filing cabinet for all the really cool ideas and really delicious recipes you’re never going to do anything with.

But if you really must go through them, here’s how.

First, toss all the magazine articles that are more than six months old and don’t mention you or a member of your immediate family by name (you can keep those; they’re called family history. Put them in an appropriately labeled file folder and file them for future generations to marvel at). You can keep any articles less than six months old that you can get read within two weeks. They aren’t going back into your file cabinet or your to-file pile. Keep only what you know you can get to within two weeks.  And remember, you will need to allot time for sleeping, eating and working during those two weeks so be realistic.

If you are a crafty person and you actually make these crafts, you have my permission to keep your favorites. Toss everything that is no longer in fashion. If those crocheted toilet paper covers really do ever come back in style, I’m sure you will find the instructions on the internet. Do not keep things just in case. Do NOT give them to your crafty friends.  They already have too many of their own and don’t need to store yours so you won’t feel guilty.

Sort the keepers by subject. For example, file knitting patterns in one folder, tole painting projects in another and home improvement ideas (that could actually happen in your house) in their own folder. Every six months go through these folders and purge them.

After the crafts we’ll tackle the recipes. If you can’t pronounce the dish or the ingredients in it, toss it. Experience shows that most people won’t cook dishes with ingredients they can’t identify—or find at the grocery store. Before keeping any more, see if you can find the recipe online and either bookmark it or download it and store in a digital recipe file (Cook’n is great for this). I’m a recipe person—I really do make them—and I’ve started tearing recipes out of magazines, taking them to my desk and looking them up online. 90% of the time, I find them. If I don’t I pop it in the scanner and digitize it on the spot. It’s much easier finding what I want to cook on my computer than it is sorting through piles of paper (and this is from the Cookbook Queen—I have close to 100 cookbooks in their own special bookcase). Give yourself a timetable for these new recipes—add them to your monthly menu. If you try it and don’t like it, toss the recipe immediately so you don’t mistakenly make it again.

And last but certainly not least are papers relating to hobbies or interests. The biggest hobby paper tiger I can think of is family history, aka genealogy, though there are certainly any number of other hobbies that can generate reams of papers to be sorted and filed. I can’t tell you what to keep and what not to keep and if you’re avidly into your hobby, I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what’s really important.

You know; you just need to ditch the guilt along with the trash.

And in the last installment of this series—just in time for the end of the school year—we’ll look at what to do with all those “treasures” your kids bring home from school.

Welcome to Part III of How to Organize Important Documents. You can read Part I here and Part II here.

At the end of Part II, I said we would talk about how to manage your current financial records, and here it is.

Organizing Current Financial Records

What  do you do with all the everyday financial records—household bills, brokerage statements, IRA records, paycheck stubs and bank statements?  Well, if you’re me, you see how many of them you can have sent to you electronically instead of in the mail. I pay as many bills as possible online and it’s a simple matter for me to store the statements by year in a “finance” file on my computer. When I need a receipt for an online payment, I save it as a PDF instead of printing it out.  I’m pretty sure I’ve saved a small forest by now, not to mention the wear and tear on my printer and shredder.

For bills that come in the mail and need to be paid the same way, I have a 3-ring binder with slip-in page protectors that I use as storage pockets. One pocket holds stamps, one holds envelopes and another holds return address labels.  The remaining pockets hold personal correspondence that needs to be addressed and business correspondence that needs to be addressed. And then there is a pocket for personal bills and one for business bills. As the bills come in the mail, the envelopes are opened, all the stuffers removed and the bill and its payment envelope go into the appropriate pocket.

On my designated bill pay day (ok, my husband’s designated bill pay day because I hate doing it), he just gets out the notebook, pulls out what he needs and pays them and the book goes back on the shelf until the next week. Once the bill is paid, it gets filed. If a document or bill will be needed for taxes at the end of the year, it either goes into a file folder marked “current taxes” in the financial drawer of my file cabinet or into a computer folder of the same name if it’s an electronic statement.

For everything else—utility bills, credit card receipts, etc.—we only keep those for six months. Every six months, I clean out the files and we start over.  Bank statements get kept for a year, as do pay stubs. Once we have a W-2, the pay stubs get shredded.  Annual brokerage and IRA statements get kept permanently.  Bills are sorted into file folders by type of expense. All credit card statements go in one folder together. All utility bills go in one folder together. All medical bills go into one folder together (medical records are filed individually by patient name–I don’t store medical bills and medical histories together).  I do keep all of my bills and financial records together in one drawer of the file cabinet. This makes both filing and retrieval much easier.  Within that section, I store the folders alphabetically.

Because I’m very lazy smart, I time my six-month purge for the month that the local shredding company has a free drop-off. I toss all my papers into a box and drop it off for them to shred. This way I don’t have to spend hours at the shredder and there’s no mess to clean up afterward.

Now that all your important papers are sorted, you can turn your attention to all those magazine articles, recipes and really great ideas you’ve clipped and saved. But this was plenty of work for one day, so I’ll cover that in my next article of the series.

How do you keep track of your bills? If you have a system that works better for you–meaning you can easily put your hands on a bill without having to hunt through all your drawers or dig through piles–I’d love to have you share it. I am always up for great new ideas, so please be sure to leave your comments and questions in the comment section below.

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