Organizing 101: Using Division Organize Just About Anything

Anytime I sit down to organize, be it clothes, papers, files, numbers, just about anything, I use my own little method. I don't know if it is the best way, or even the fastest, but it does seem to work for me. I wanted to write up an article to try to share it with you. Hopefully someone out there can find it works for them, or even let me know a better way!

The first thing I do is get everything in a pile, for the purpose of this lets say I am organizing all of the papers in my 'to be filed' file in my filing cabinet, and there are usually a lot of papers in there. The first thing I do is separate that stack of paper into 2 piles, one for trash, and one for 'other'. Then I take the 'other' stack and further divide that into piles for receipts, bills, contracts, etc. At this point I do not care if the receipt is work related or not, or what the bill is for, I am just getting all of the receipts together, same with any other piece of paper, it does not matter if the contract is from last year or this year, we will get to that later.

Once I have those piles, I delve into them one by one and further divide them until I just can not any more. Usually this means I have 30 piles of paper all around me, but at the end, I have 30 piles of clearly divided information that I can then file away. As I said this may not be the most time effective, but it is the only way that works for me so far. It helps to not get overwhelmed by the information you are processing and leads to a much more effective resolution.

If I were to sit down with a huge stack of papers and try to immediately divide that into the 30, I would get overwhelmed and end up stopping half way through, with this, I tackle it a little bit at a time, only thinking about 2 to 3 major things at a time, is it a receipt, a bill, or a contract? Not "Is it a work receipt, a personal receipt, is it from this month, last month, work related, see... I get anxious just typing it. Baby steps.