February: Paperwork Month

Brace yourself.

Photos of piles of paper coming your way! No, wait, overturned piles of paper!

Exciting stuff! (You can hear the sarcasm in my voice, right?)

Paper is such a monster that I thoroughly recommend professional help. Some of the best available  is The Paper Clutter course from Simplify 101. I've taken it more than once and each time I get another piece of the puzzle worked out. For a while, anyway! Paper is like laundry and the dishes: one has to be consistent with dealing with it--or it becomes unmanageable.

Unfortunately, I am at the "unmanageable" stage yet again.

This month I am focusing just on the day to day paper--trying to reduce some of it (for example, signing up for e-bills). As well, I want to deal with the stuff from 2012. I also want to get all my documents needed for doing our taxes in one place and get caught up on our budget. (Namely, December and Christmas needs to be tracked and accounted for.)

For this project I am going to rely on Tsh Oxenreider's little e-book, One Bite at a Time. Out of 52 projects, fully 5 of them deal with paper. (Ok one deals with e-mail, but it counts. It's an information system with storage and retrieval issues, just like paper. Mentally, it's the same for me. And, I have 147 messages in my inbox right now.)


These projects are:

#8 Streamline Your Mail
#9 Streamline Your receipt system
#17 Create an Essentials Papers file
#21 Organize your Files
#27 Streamline your E-mail

So, for this first week, it breaks down like this:

1) Work on budget 15 min/day.
2) Follow through on steps for streamlining paperwork.
3) Deal with my e-mail for 10 minutes/day. Record the number of messages left in my inbox at the end of each day to track my progress.
4) Chip away at the avalanche, 10 minutes/day.
5) Choose a container for the papers and files related to our taxes.

I've made up my tracking sheet and I'm ready to go.