Paper Progress

It has been piling up.

(Can you tell I've got my fancy camera back from the shop? Hooray!)

My back is quite bad today: I'm not much good at standing, even. So, the dreaded task was about the only thing I could do today. To make it bearable, I set the timer.

After the first 15 minutes I had this:


At this point, I decided to deal with the files in this file holder:


This is where most of the papers get filed. It sits under my desk and it is easy to pull out and put on a chair, just like this. It holds school newsletters, the investment reports we get every month, the bills, medical bills and receipts, bank statements. In other words, it holds the mail.

I had let the "in" pile grow, in part, because because I needed to separate out all the stuff in this from 2010. So I took a few minutes and did that: and put what we needed for taxes into a separate file. (We have a friend who is an accountant do our taxes for us for free, but since we always expect a refund, we wait until the tax deadline is past before we give him our papers. In Canada, the deadline, which is April 30th, only applies to those who owe the government money.)

Once I'd made some progress on that front, I felt able to tackle the stack for another 15 minutes.

That left me with this:


Where else does it go?

Anything requiring action goes here:



Kids' art and memorabilia gets put into a page protector and put in one of these binders:



Things I need to store long-term but need handy goes in a file box in my desk:


I keep the warranties in file folders here as well. I think I'll change that. It makes the box very heavy.

I have a few reference binders I use as well, for example, gardening designs go into my Gardening reference binder. I developed the system after taking Aby Garvey's Paper Clutter class at Simplify 101, and if you feel in need of figuring out how to get a handle on your paper, I cannot recommend it enough.

And so, another 15 minutes took us to the bottom.



Whew.

Now I'm all ready for the mail tomorrow.