It's a rainy day today, and I am finally finished sending out my outstanding orders. As much as I would love to just take the day off and do nothing, I have a giant stack of paperwork staring back at me!
I have several files already set up, but since our new computer arrived, I have decided to rearrange my desk. Things are coming along nicely, but it is forcing me to tackle some of the paperwork projects that I have been putting off for a while.
I will be taking pictures during the day to show you part of the process, but here is the list of the supplies I have ready to go to tackle this project!
File Folders
Label Maker
Large clean surface (my living room floor)
Stacks of paperwork
Empty file box
Note pad
Pens/Pencils
Shredder
I am not sure if I will be able to reveal my final office yet, but stay tuned hopefully it will come soon!
Showing posts with label paperwork. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paperwork. Show all posts
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Cleaning up my houses – Dealing with the influx of Papers!
So, yesterday I wrote about getting yourself out of the paperwork pile up, and today I thought I would talk about dealing with the inflow of paperwork to prevent a catastrophic paperwork pile up!
First of all, everyone is different! The way that you deal with cleaning, picking up, paperwork, filing, and just about everything else in your life is probably different that the way that anyone else does. So, if you don’t like my way, that is fine, but keep searching and trying different things until you find something that works for you.
There are basically 3 ways that paperwork is generated in my house – The mail, the business, and the people. There are things that are kept and things that are tossed in each, however, the things that are tossed almost never get immediately tossed. So, here is my protocol for each!
The mail – First you should know that my husband and I have always had separate bank accounts and he has certain bills that he pays, and I have certain bills that I pay. It works for us – but if you have joint accounts you can us this system too, you just need to tailor it to your needs. I get the mail, and on the way back to the house I thumb threw it. Basically there are 5 different things that come in the mail – junk, bills, coupons, cards and letters, and purchases. If the junk is addressed to the household or to me I pitch it right away. Next, anything for my husband goes in his mail sorter, cards and letters for me or the kids are opened quickly, purchases are opened quickly, bills for me are opened and put into a tray on my desk and coupons go into a basket in my kitchen. Once bills are paid all of the stubs go into a tray on my desk that is cleaned out/filed monthly. Cards and letters are kept in a friends and family file and I generally go through this file annually (sometimes more often), Coupons are dealt with on coupon day which is either Sunday or Monday, and purchases are put away.
Business Paperwork – The majority of paperwork for my business is generated at my desk, so I have 3 bins that are set up on my desk. They are labeled – Immediate, Ongoing, and File. The immediate file is for bills that need to be paid, orders that I need to fill, and other household items that need to be dealt with quickly. The ongoing file is for ideas that I am currently working on and for things that I use regularly like inventory sheets and mailing labels. File is for all household bill stubs, all delivery confirmations, business receipts, business bill stubs, and anything else that needs to be filed. The immediate file is looked at everyday and sometimes several times a day. The Ongoing file is also looked at daily. The filing bin is emptied at least monthly or sooner if it is full.
The people paperwork – This is any paperwork that is brought into the house by any member of this family. The majority of this is school papers, but quite often there are receipts and other bits of paper that contain information. I have a designated place in the kitchen where all people generated paperwork goes, and I try to empty it out daily, but lots of times it is a week before it is emptied. Really it just depends on how much time I have. Basically anything that needs to be filed, (mainly receipts) ends up in the bin on my desk. The bits of paper that contain important information are usually stuck to the fridge (I need a better system for this!!). It is the school papers that are the biggest problem! I have a file in our filing cabinet for each child and a new one is made each year. I try to weed out stuff before it goes into this file, but sometimes everything is a master piece and mom must go through it when no one is home! I do try to limit the amount of things that I keep, but the most important thing is that I try to date things as they come home. However, quite a few times I just know the year because of the file I have put it in. I am sure I have kept too much, and I am reminded of this when my mother or mother-in-law shows up with yet another box of treasures that they kept!
There is one paperwork issue that I have left out – magazines, catalogs, and phone books. Of all the paperwork issues in my house, this is the one that irritates me the most. I currently only get one magazine, and I let each of the kids get one magazine. I look at my magazine and then it goes straight to the recycle bin. If there is something I want to keep from the magazine, I cut it out and put it into a binder immediately! I do the same thing with catalogs that I get and we only keep one phone book. However, everyone else in this house keeps their magazines. I HATE IT!! My husband has years, and years of magazines in his building. I am convinced that he will NEVER look at any of them, although he swears that they all contain wonderful articles that he is going to refer back to. I ask him if he has ever done this in the past – his response is always once or twice. I have NEVER witnessed one of these monumental events. Yes, it is a pet peeve of mine!
Personally I have two binders in my house where I keep article clippings – one is for recipes and one is for everything else. I will be splitting the second binder soon and have a 3rd binder that is only for gardening. So, if I see an article that contains useful information – I put it in the binder behind a relevant tab, so that I can actually find it when I am looking for it. I have been putting stuff in these same binders for about 15 years, and let me tell you the 3 binders take up significantly less space than 15 years worth of magazines. I keep these binders on the bookshelf.
This post is long enough – I will talk about how I have files set up in my filing cabinet another day – for now, I am off to purge some magazines! (I promise the kids won’t miss them!)
First of all, everyone is different! The way that you deal with cleaning, picking up, paperwork, filing, and just about everything else in your life is probably different that the way that anyone else does. So, if you don’t like my way, that is fine, but keep searching and trying different things until you find something that works for you.
There are basically 3 ways that paperwork is generated in my house – The mail, the business, and the people. There are things that are kept and things that are tossed in each, however, the things that are tossed almost never get immediately tossed. So, here is my protocol for each!
The mail – First you should know that my husband and I have always had separate bank accounts and he has certain bills that he pays, and I have certain bills that I pay. It works for us – but if you have joint accounts you can us this system too, you just need to tailor it to your needs. I get the mail, and on the way back to the house I thumb threw it. Basically there are 5 different things that come in the mail – junk, bills, coupons, cards and letters, and purchases. If the junk is addressed to the household or to me I pitch it right away. Next, anything for my husband goes in his mail sorter, cards and letters for me or the kids are opened quickly, purchases are opened quickly, bills for me are opened and put into a tray on my desk and coupons go into a basket in my kitchen. Once bills are paid all of the stubs go into a tray on my desk that is cleaned out/filed monthly. Cards and letters are kept in a friends and family file and I generally go through this file annually (sometimes more often), Coupons are dealt with on coupon day which is either Sunday or Monday, and purchases are put away.
Business Paperwork – The majority of paperwork for my business is generated at my desk, so I have 3 bins that are set up on my desk. They are labeled – Immediate, Ongoing, and File. The immediate file is for bills that need to be paid, orders that I need to fill, and other household items that need to be dealt with quickly. The ongoing file is for ideas that I am currently working on and for things that I use regularly like inventory sheets and mailing labels. File is for all household bill stubs, all delivery confirmations, business receipts, business bill stubs, and anything else that needs to be filed. The immediate file is looked at everyday and sometimes several times a day. The Ongoing file is also looked at daily. The filing bin is emptied at least monthly or sooner if it is full.
The people paperwork – This is any paperwork that is brought into the house by any member of this family. The majority of this is school papers, but quite often there are receipts and other bits of paper that contain information. I have a designated place in the kitchen where all people generated paperwork goes, and I try to empty it out daily, but lots of times it is a week before it is emptied. Really it just depends on how much time I have. Basically anything that needs to be filed, (mainly receipts) ends up in the bin on my desk. The bits of paper that contain important information are usually stuck to the fridge (I need a better system for this!!). It is the school papers that are the biggest problem! I have a file in our filing cabinet for each child and a new one is made each year. I try to weed out stuff before it goes into this file, but sometimes everything is a master piece and mom must go through it when no one is home! I do try to limit the amount of things that I keep, but the most important thing is that I try to date things as they come home. However, quite a few times I just know the year because of the file I have put it in. I am sure I have kept too much, and I am reminded of this when my mother or mother-in-law shows up with yet another box of treasures that they kept!
There is one paperwork issue that I have left out – magazines, catalogs, and phone books. Of all the paperwork issues in my house, this is the one that irritates me the most. I currently only get one magazine, and I let each of the kids get one magazine. I look at my magazine and then it goes straight to the recycle bin. If there is something I want to keep from the magazine, I cut it out and put it into a binder immediately! I do the same thing with catalogs that I get and we only keep one phone book. However, everyone else in this house keeps their magazines. I HATE IT!! My husband has years, and years of magazines in his building. I am convinced that he will NEVER look at any of them, although he swears that they all contain wonderful articles that he is going to refer back to. I ask him if he has ever done this in the past – his response is always once or twice. I have NEVER witnessed one of these monumental events. Yes, it is a pet peeve of mine!
Personally I have two binders in my house where I keep article clippings – one is for recipes and one is for everything else. I will be splitting the second binder soon and have a 3rd binder that is only for gardening. So, if I see an article that contains useful information – I put it in the binder behind a relevant tab, so that I can actually find it when I am looking for it. I have been putting stuff in these same binders for about 15 years, and let me tell you the 3 binders take up significantly less space than 15 years worth of magazines. I keep these binders on the bookshelf.
This post is long enough – I will talk about how I have files set up in my filing cabinet another day – for now, I am off to purge some magazines! (I promise the kids won’t miss them!)
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Cleaning up my houses - Paperwork! Paperwork! Paperwork!
I will say that the biggest cleaning battles that I have in my house are laundry, dishes, and paperwork. So, today, I am going to write about how I am tackling the paperwork in my house. In my ‘cleaning up my houses’ approach, paperwork generally spills into all of the houses. There are business papers, kids papers, family cards and addresses, important papers that fit into the spouse house, of course financial papers, crafting books, and so on. So, tackling this project seems to spill over into cleaning up all of my houses. It is a task that I loath, but a necessary one!
The paperwork monster had been growing for months. Sure, the newspapers generally made it to the recycling center, and junk mail was dealt with accordingly, but the kids papers, receipts, business papers, bills, magazines, photographs, cards, and the list goes on and on… were starting to drive me insane. So first things first, I got some empty boxes and bins and just started gathering papers from all over the house and putting them in the boxes. When all was said and done, I had 3-4 large containers of paperwork. Really, I almost gave up at that point. The shear enormity of the problem was sitting right in front of me. So, a couple of weeks ago, when the kiddos were going to spend the night with my mother and my husband was out of town working, I decided to cancel my plans of working on crafts and finally tackle the paperwork.
UGH! This was not what I wanted to do on my evening of peace and quiet, but I just kept thinking how much better I would feel that it was all behind me. So, I put in a movie – one that I had seen before and didn’t need to watch too closely, grabbed something to drink, and plopped down in the middle of the living room with one of my boxes.
What was I going to do now? I didn’t have files already labeled; I didn’t even know what to label them if I had them. So, I just started sorting.
First I made 4 stacks – One was “recycle”, one was “shred”, one was “personal”, and the last was “business”. I sorted the whole box into one of these 4 piles. When I was finished, 2/3rds of the paperwork was either in shred or recycle and those stacks were falling over. So, I converted the now empty box into the recycle pile, and went ahead and shredded the shred pile and added the shreds to the recycle. On to box number two, box number 3, and finally box number 4.
It was a quick sort, and not the time to read things carefully, just quickly sorting and moving on to the next piece of paper.
At that point, I was really inspired to keep on going. So, I decided to go ahead and tackle the business stack. Most of the items in this stack were papers that I needed for tax purposes. So, I sorted this stack by 2008 taxes, 2009 taxes, things that I need to do something with immediately, and everything else.
This sort when slower than the initial sort, but still relatively quickly, and I was ready to further sort the stacks.
When I was finished with the sorting I then got out the label maker and put each section into a file folder with a label.
Sorting the non-business stuff was basically the same process. However, I did take the time to write the year on all of the children’s artwork that I decided to keep, and I tried to keep only the things that were either achievements or special pictures. I also made a special stack for addresses that need to be added to our address book, photos, and coupons.
Again, I labeled folders and put things in the folders when I was finished sorting.
By the end of the evening, and it was a very late night, I felt very accomplished. Although, I did have a sense that I had created more work for myself by bringing my attention to a lot of the un-done things that were outstanding. However, I knew that when it came time to do those tasks, like putting addresses in the address book, I would know where everything was!
I know that others could probably handle this much more efficiently than I did, by not handling the same piece of paper 5 or 6 times and just starting out with more stacks. However, for me, it was nice to be able to sit in one place and not have to think about what I had a pile for and when I needed to start a new pile. Also, I knew that I could stop and start pretty easily.
If you don’t have an entire evening to devote to your project like I did, I would recommend that you just create a pile and do the initial sort of getting the stuff you don’t need to keep out first. Hopefully your stacks will shrink like mine did!
Again, if you have tips to share, please do!
The paperwork monster had been growing for months. Sure, the newspapers generally made it to the recycling center, and junk mail was dealt with accordingly, but the kids papers, receipts, business papers, bills, magazines, photographs, cards, and the list goes on and on… were starting to drive me insane. So first things first, I got some empty boxes and bins and just started gathering papers from all over the house and putting them in the boxes. When all was said and done, I had 3-4 large containers of paperwork. Really, I almost gave up at that point. The shear enormity of the problem was sitting right in front of me. So, a couple of weeks ago, when the kiddos were going to spend the night with my mother and my husband was out of town working, I decided to cancel my plans of working on crafts and finally tackle the paperwork.
UGH! This was not what I wanted to do on my evening of peace and quiet, but I just kept thinking how much better I would feel that it was all behind me. So, I put in a movie – one that I had seen before and didn’t need to watch too closely, grabbed something to drink, and plopped down in the middle of the living room with one of my boxes.
What was I going to do now? I didn’t have files already labeled; I didn’t even know what to label them if I had them. So, I just started sorting.
First I made 4 stacks – One was “recycle”, one was “shred”, one was “personal”, and the last was “business”. I sorted the whole box into one of these 4 piles. When I was finished, 2/3rds of the paperwork was either in shred or recycle and those stacks were falling over. So, I converted the now empty box into the recycle pile, and went ahead and shredded the shred pile and added the shreds to the recycle. On to box number two, box number 3, and finally box number 4.
It was a quick sort, and not the time to read things carefully, just quickly sorting and moving on to the next piece of paper.
At that point, I was really inspired to keep on going. So, I decided to go ahead and tackle the business stack. Most of the items in this stack were papers that I needed for tax purposes. So, I sorted this stack by 2008 taxes, 2009 taxes, things that I need to do something with immediately, and everything else.
This sort when slower than the initial sort, but still relatively quickly, and I was ready to further sort the stacks.
When I was finished with the sorting I then got out the label maker and put each section into a file folder with a label.
Sorting the non-business stuff was basically the same process. However, I did take the time to write the year on all of the children’s artwork that I decided to keep, and I tried to keep only the things that were either achievements or special pictures. I also made a special stack for addresses that need to be added to our address book, photos, and coupons.
Again, I labeled folders and put things in the folders when I was finished sorting.
By the end of the evening, and it was a very late night, I felt very accomplished. Although, I did have a sense that I had created more work for myself by bringing my attention to a lot of the un-done things that were outstanding. However, I knew that when it came time to do those tasks, like putting addresses in the address book, I would know where everything was!
I know that others could probably handle this much more efficiently than I did, by not handling the same piece of paper 5 or 6 times and just starting out with more stacks. However, for me, it was nice to be able to sit in one place and not have to think about what I had a pile for and when I needed to start a new pile. Also, I knew that I could stop and start pretty easily.
If you don’t have an entire evening to devote to your project like I did, I would recommend that you just create a pile and do the initial sort of getting the stuff you don’t need to keep out first. Hopefully your stacks will shrink like mine did!
Again, if you have tips to share, please do!
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