This article by Denise Russos, Progressive Organizing Solutions and Paper Tiger Expert, gives us a great plan to conquer our clutter and paper filing problems! The Paper Tiger Document Management Software and Filing System (Paper Tiger Online or Paper Tiger desktop version) will help you accomplish this very efficiently and be able to later find what you’ve filed!
Conquering the paper issues in an office or home can be the most stressful part of getting organized. Everyone realizes they actually keep too many clothes, or too many pots and pans, or even too many of whatever it is. We’re just so afraid to get rid of the paper trails in our lives that we hold on to every slip of receipt, and every article we’ve ever wanted to read so we are overwhelmed with paper! I know what I’m talking about! Aunt Mary sent you a card! Uncle Jim sent a article on fly fishing! I can hear you now! “If I get rid of it, they are going to ask me for it or about it!”
This week I’ve been out of town working with a woman who is trying to get her papers in order. She is part of a large family corporation that owns a lot of land, ranches, oil fields, farms, etc. She is really great, but she is just like everyone else when it comes to paper. By the way, she is doing a magnificent job at the clearing out process and yesterday began the process of learning how to scan documents and enter them into her new centrally understood filing system! But I digress here. I will explain what this type of filing system is soon! Be patient.
It doesn’t matter if you are a one person family or a ten person family, you will have paper clutter. Clutter is postponed decisions. Everywhere you look some surface in your home or office is cluttered with papers that should have had decisions made about them the minute they hit your desk or counter top! So the first thing I want to address is your lack of habit!
Lack of habit is the cause of clutter. We have tendencies that say, I’ll get to it later. Only we don’t. So it builds up until we have to take entire days to do something that originally should only take a few minutes or an hour at a time to complete. This goes for other things than taking care of paper clutter, but we’ll stick to paper clutter management for now.
If I look around my home office, I can see trends that need improvement and I bet you can too. Little slips of paper my adult son left on the home computer desk that should have been thrown away. Or the fact that I went out of town for several days and now have an accumulation of mail on my desk to go through. Or that stack of magazines that only have one article in them I wanted to read. So as I go along, I do what I teach my clients to do. Reading that article is first, because I can certainly clear the space if I decide not to keep the article. I definitely will not keep the magazine!
As for the mail, which is the biggest contributor to paper trash in the household or office, it is next. I have to decide to file it for future decisions, act on it if it is necessary, or trash it.
While I was out of town I spoke with some ladies at the Millennium Hotel in Durham. Sweet ladies, but they were as mind boggled over what to throw away as the next person.
Keep these rules in mind!
The point here is that every piece of paper that comes into your home or office needs some type of Action. You only have three choices. Make them wisely and you will have less and less piles of paper and more desk real estate to use for important things!
A friend of mine, Stephanie Calahan said something recently on how long it takes to create a habit. It is generally accepted that it is a 21 day process. However, I agree with Stephanie that it can take up to seven weeks to create a sustainable habit.
Knowing what you have to do, and doing it are two different things. You know you need to get it under control. Clutter is a stress magnet and if you can get the clutter under control or gone forever, wouldn’t you? Reduce your stress, reduce your blood pressure, and try to enjoy a wonderfully new environment by becoming clutter free!
Denise Russos, Progressive Organizing Solutions
Original article posted: Making Your Filing System Work for You!
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Tags: Declutter, document management software, document management system, filing system software, get organized, paper filing systems, Paper Tiger "finding" filing system, what to do with paper files
