Paper Tiger Blog

It’s that time of year again, time to get the house spruced up for whatever winter holiday you and your family recognize and celebrate. Even if it isn’t the winter holiday, before you know it, Valentine’s arrives or St. Patrick’s Day or Easter. No matter the area of the world you’re in, practically every month there is some need to locate and pull out different types of decorations.

It can be a chore when trying to locate where you have certain decorations stored when it seems some are in the garage, some are in the attic and some have made their way into the basement. Or you may have them all tangled together just to keep them all in one place. The problem is, this big tangled mess can cause damage to the seasonal décor you have stored. This may even make you so frustrated you opt to forgo adding any holiday cheer to your home or lawn altogether.

The important thing really is to use a filing system software like Paper Tiger to keep track of what you own, what you are storing and where it is being stored so that the items can be easily and quickly retrieved when you need them. Indexing your items into Paper Tiger filing system will ensure that you know exactly where these things are, before you end up buying duplicates of something because you can’t find the original. Documenting or indexing your belongings also helps other people who may need to retrieve things for you. With a quick search in the software database, anyone will be able to find an item and also know where it should be placed when it needs to go back to the storage location.

The Great Holiday Décor Declutter

You don’t have to give up on decorating your home out of frustration. Locating those holiday decorations doesn’t even have to be an overwhelming task anymore. In fact, it no longer has to cause a sense of dread even putting all the decorations away after the holiday is over. All you have to do is get an organization system in place, and the rest practically takes care of itself. It will take a little effort to get things in order to begin with, but once you invest this initial work into the project, your holiday decorating will be easy as can be for each occasion.

The first thing you will want to do is decide what type of storage you want to use. Plastic bins are one of the most popular choices for most people. The size of bins you need will depend on the amount of decorations you have.  Then simply decide how you want the items divided up. For the majority of people, it makes most sense to store different holiday decorations in different bins, for example, all spring items in one bin, all fall items in one bin, all Thanksgiving items in one bin, etc. Keeping like-holiday items together will make retrieving them later much easier.

Implementing Paper Tiger Filing System for Organizing Your Decorations

The next step is to enter the list of items in each bin into your filing system software database. So for bin number one, you type in all the items being stored including alternate keywords into the database. If you are creating a Halloween bin, for example, you may enter keywords such as “electric jack o’ lantern,” or “plug in pumpkin.” If you include both of these as possible search terms, you never have to worry later when you cannot recall what name you used to index the items. That type of problem is common with filing systems that simply use alphabetizing as the organization approach.

Finally number that bin, pack the contents inside and move on to the next one. You can store the bins in any area of the house or outside storage areas and always be able to find exactly the holiday decorations you want. You can even make a note in your filing system of where each bin is, garage for example, to make the task of retrieval as simple as possible.

Example:  Boxes of Seasonal Decorations

1. You can name a Location in Paper Tiger ‘Decorations’ and say you have 5 boxes of seasonal decorations, so your Location capacity would be 5. In the description for the Location, you can input where you will store your boxes of decorations, such as ‘Decorations are stored in Basement Shelf 1 of 2 on 2^nd from top shelf ′.
2. Print out labels from the database to be affixed to the 5 boxes. Your labels will read Decorations 1, Decorations 2, Decorations 3, Decorations 4, Decorations 5.
3. Enter Item Name for each theme of decorations that you have, i.e., Valentine’s Day might be in Item # 1, Spring might be Item #2, Halloween #3, Thanksgiving #4, Christmas #5, which would each match your bin or box numbers. Then in the keywords section, you can index each item going into the matching bin or box.
4. Enter Keywords for each theme, such as in box #1, Valentine’s item keywords might be heart streamer, craft instructions, gift ideas; box #2, your Spring item keywords might include a spring flag, bunnies, tablecloth and picnic items, etc.
5. Match Label Numbers and Item Names: Make sure the label number you affix to each box matches the decoration theme that you input for the Item Name.

See other great ideas from our Not Just For Paper Filing webpage!

Tell Us in the Comment Section Below…What/How Do You Uniquely Use Paper Tiger Filing System Software to Get Organized?

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Tags: Declutter, filing system software, get organized, organize holiday decorations, Paper Tiger "finding" filing system

2 Responses to “Filing System Software to Help Organize Holiday Decorations”

1. Beverly says:

   December 13, 2011 at 12:32 pm

   Every year I tell myself that I must organize my Christmas decoration storage so I can easily retrieve it. Little did I realize that I had the solution to my challenge until I read the blog about organizing holiday decorations by using Paper Tiger.

   Thanks a bunch and Happy Holidays!!!
2. Janet Baker says:

   December 13, 2011 at 4:56 pm

   Beverly,
   Thanks so much for your comment! It’s great to know that you’ll be using Paper Tiger now to get one more thing in your life organized! And we are so glad that our blog article will trigger your imagination to many other things that can be organized with Paper Tiger! Thanks again!