What to Do About Paper Clutter

Paper clutter can affect our productivity at work. Being in front of a cluttered desk, or seeing your home office full of scattered & disorganized paper work may actually hamper our working spirits & will probably make us lazy too.

The first thing we need to think about is a filing system. File cabinets are available for sale at office supply stores and require very little space. Also, purchase paper file folders as they will be good to put into the file cabinets.

Organizing files

Now comes the difficult part of the task. The pile of papers must be ordered thus categorized and discriminated. Categorize the papers you want to keep for instance bills, tax papers, old bills, receipts, home maintenance and etc into separate folders.

We should be specific in naming the files without having to file every single piece of paper into its own file. Keep it relatively general so as to avoid having plenty of almost empty files. A file named 'Gardening' for example can have tool warranties, product pamphlets, brochures, garden tile invoices but not receipts which belong in a general receipt folder for convenient monthly expenditure calculations.

The name of the files or file headings should be appropriate for its contents. It will make searching for the files in the future a much easier task as opposed to having a non related file heading.

We can then start arranging the stacks in an alphabetical order placed in the file cabinets, by the most frequently used at the front of the drawer or by any other order which is suitable & will make the papers easily accessible to us. Stacks with a large amount of papers should be placed into 2 or more separate folders.

Junk paper decision

We have now organized our papers & placed them in an orderly fashion into a file cabinet. Now, what do we do with the remaining pile of paper that did not get categorized & became discriminated? We should decide whether they will be placed somewhere out of sight or become garbage.