Managing papers at home

Every start of a month marks the end of another one. How do we deal with the paperwork that accumulates with monthly bills, invitations, flyers, tax-relevant receipts, personal papers, bank statements, etc.?

Here’s what an ideal world would look like: any incoming paperwork is sorted right at the doorstep:

• flyers of limited or no interest go straight into the recycling bin;
  
• think of newsletters as either flyers (if they are unsolicited) or magazines (if you have a subscription) and deal with them accordingly;
• newspapers and magazines (and some newsletters) go where you intend to read them, taking good care to remove the previous issues and disposing of them – remember that recycling bin;
• personal letters are separated from business correspondence;
• bills, personal and business, go to the place where you usually deal with paperwork.

This sounds pretty straightforward, but not exactly how things work at your home, or does it? Think of this as a general guideline because things are not usually as clear-cut as this, of course. If some of the flyers or newsletters might look interesting and warrant closer examination, take them to the reading table. If you know you won’t have time to read the newspaper before tomorrow … maybe don’t even put it onto the reading table at all. There is flexibility of sorts, however, there are several rules you should always follow:

• Bills: once separated and relocated to their spot, should be dealt with directly;
• Finished paperwork (bill, etc.): once you have dealt with them, take a good look at the papers and decide if you need to keep them or not. If paying or dealing with them makes them obsolete, by all means, find that recycle bin;
• Reading materials: once you have read them, take them away directly (recycle bin, anyone?) to avoid a pile-up of old papers.

Does this sound too strict? Maybe. On the other hand, following those rules will make sure you’ll never be late with payments, no superfluous paperwork is lying around waiting for action, and you’ll never have to wonder if you are up to date with your paperwork again. Plus: each piece of paper you have removed from your household will never come back to haunt you in the shape of paper clutter!

Going one step further and looking at the home office, the idea of throwing out papers may seem a little over the top, but maybe you’ll change your mind after this paragraph. Just imagine how much of our paperwork is actually online and in the cloud anyway: banking happens online, and even if you receive a printed bank statement, once you have checked it there is no need to keep it, really, as all that information is also available online for as long as you need to keep it. Similarly for utilities bills: once you have paid them, you only really need to keep the last one for reference as it contains all the information you need (and usually things happen online as well). If you give it some more thought, you’ll probably find that the majority of what we do in paper format is duplicated electronically somewhere accessible.

Exercise

When you next receive a monthly (or otherwise regular bill), go about paying it as you would normally. When it comes to filing that bill, locate the folder (in the hopes that you have one) with the previous bills and find out if the old ones actually contain information that you cannot see on the new one. Most likely you’ll have to agree that there is no need to keep the old ones.

• Take all of those related bills, quickly check if there is anything like the initial contract or likewise in the pile, only keep those rare papers and add the last bill on top.
• Next time you pay that this type of bill (or file it), take the old one out (recycle bin again), replace it with the latest one.

If you follows these simple steps for each supplier, you’ll end up not only with a lot less paperwork to keep, but also you’ll find your stuff easier if you are looking for it. Doing this as a matter of regular maintenance also avoids those times when you have to spend a lot of time to sort through all your paperwork because it has gotten out of hand…

Home office specifics

When it comes to business papers and correspondence, notes, administrative paperwork, tax papers, etc., things are a little different. Of course we want to keep a paper trace of what is going on. However, even in the home office of a small business, there is room for manoeuvre in terms of reducing the paper piles. Here are a couple of examples:

• We want to keep client related information, of course, but how long do you actually want to keep paperwork on a client you haven’t worked for in a couple of years? If you really cannot part with it, maybe think about keeping the active client files in your office and move anything else into an archive space?
• As a business, you will need to keep tax materials for seven years (this is the UK, if your business is located elsewhere, look it up!). Most of us will keep these things indefinitely, of course, and who am I to dispute that. However, after those seven years we could potentially only keep the actual tax papers and discard the corresponding proofs, right? This will also take care of the most annoying kind of paperwork we have to face: crinkled, folded, and small bits of paper, faded credit card slips and cash receipts. Since those are difficult to file anyway, they usually end up in boxes. Wouldn’t it be lovely to get rid of some of those? Think about it.

Those are just a couple of suggestions on how to deal with the growing paper mountains in our homes and home offices. Of course, not all of those will apply to your particular situation, I’m sure. These examples might have made you wonder if you could actually find some way to make them work for yourself. I can only hope that they have made you take a good look at how you deal with your own paperwork, and how those strategies could be modified to get it done more smoothly.

If you have enjoyed reading this, you may find these other articles interesting:

• Administrative clutter: filing strategies
  
• Electronica
  
• Making choices