Drowning in paper: How to organise your paperwork
Does paperwork have a habit of piling up around your home or workplace? Liz Gresson, professional organiser and owner of Hampshire-based organising business www.allorganisedforyou.co.uk has been there too. In this post she shares her thoughts about paperwork - why it piles up, how it makes us feel, and what we can do about it.Drowning in paper!
I hate paper! I don't mean books or magazines, although I make sure newspapers and magazines are recycled straight after reading and not allowed to pile up. For years I worked in solicitors' offices which don't seem to have changed much since the days of Charles Dickens, with stacks of bulging files piled up on shelves and on the floor round the desks. Every morning my boss would put fresh letters and documents which had arrived in the post or been printed off from email on to my desk. We went through reams of paper in the printer every week, often duplicating documents, in my view unnecessarily. Some days I felt as if I couldn't breathe for all the paper around me. Many people work in offices like these and don't want to come home to a house which resembles them in terms of piles of paper everywhere. Working from home is a great option, but there is the ever-present danger of paper building up.
Freedom from paper
Now that I'm a professional organiser, my mission is to provide freedom from the paper that seems to come into our houses faster than we can deal with it: leaflets advertising all sorts of things from pizzas to conservatory blinds, letters from the bank, charity requests, renewal reminders from insurance companies and many others. We print off emails and attachments, planning to read them at our leisure. It doesn't take long for a stack of assorted paperwork to pile up. I use a number of strategies to organise and minimise paper in our home as well as effective storage solutions. I have methods for dealing with paperwork in ways which reduce stress and increase efficiency.
Liz's Top Tips
My top tips are:- Keep all paperwork in one place.
- Go through it once a week, recycling or shredding what you don't need and dealing immediately with anything which needs to be actioned.
- Always select the paperless option with your bank, utility company, pension provider, insurer, etc. An added benefit here is that this can result in lower bills.
- Scan important documents e.g. insurance policy schedules and shred the paper copy.
- Sign up to the Mail Preference Service (mpsonline.org.uk) to filter out junk mail.
If you need some help to start organising your paperwork, you can find your local professional organiser here.