My household includes my spouse, a bunch of kids, and a bunch of pets. We're continually inundated with paperwork: personal, business, school, medical, local goings on, etc. My spouse and kids never throw anything away--stuff just gets parked on any and every flat surface in the house. It's hard to keep the mess under control.
I already have a handle on picking up behind them and tossing the stuff that doesn't need to be kept, but I'm stymied by the stuff that does. I don't have, nor do I want, a big ugly filing cabinet in my house. But the stacks of folders and papers I have now are even worse.
I'd love to hear what you guys have come up with to tackle this. Pictures of your favorite solutions are a plus. Thanks!
I have a two-drawer steel filing cabinet. They're like minivans -- ugly and nobody wants one, but when you need one there really isn't anything else that will do the job as well.
I would consider scanning documents and then throwing them away.
We have a 4 drawer filing cabinet in our office.
Top drawer has 12 folders marked by month. All paperwork, receipts into the month we are in. On July 1 (or so) the little lady pulls out all the 2022 stuff and I'm the shredder. Any key receipt might stay in for another year or two.
Drawer 2 has folders for the product manuals - dishwasher, stove, lawnmower - all that stuff. Other boring crap.
Drawer 3 is sentimental stuff - old family history - car paper memorabilia.
Drawer 4 is taxes and other long term stuff.
I have 2 wide, 3 ring binders full of all the 401k, IRA and financial information- if I die she has everything in two binders. The reports get rotated to shred as needed.
Yes, scan it all - we started this 36 years ago and I'm not interested in spending evenings over a hot scanner.
Nothing cooler than my moms 1936 birth certificate right in my hand. In the end my kid's tossing it into a recycling bin and if it's scanned his computer will crash. He doesn't care that it's noted my mom was born at home.
I have a two drawer filing cabinet for inactive stuff I don't want to toss (old income taxes, records with proof of ownership or sale, etc), and I use file boxes for active accounts. Each account/item gets its own folder in one of the file boxes. Bills and other records I keep get stashed in a drawer for several months, until it becomes pretty much full. At that point, I drag out the file boxes, and file the paperwork. Since everything is done by date, I also pull an equivalent amount of paperwork out of the back and shred/burn it, unless it is something that needs to be kept indefinitely.
Not the best system in the world, but as I am a bit of a hoarder, it works to keep my papers organized, and since I don't want to buy more file boxes, I have to get rid of older papers as new ones go in. Now if I could only get my wife to file her stuff instead of letting it build up...
I went for the "scan everything" approach, automated as much as possible. A high-speed double-sided scanner that also does OCR (I have an older version of this fujitsu scanner) and software that can automatically process and rename the files into destination folders. I'm on a mac, so I am using software called hazel (here). You set up rules based on the content, and it will do stuff like parse the text looking for dates and you can automatically rename the file using a date found in the file.
The scanner it set up to drop the scans in a given place, and hazel wakes up and renames/refiles it depending on the content. As a bonus, even for "paperless" accounts, I can download the randomly-named PDF and drop it in that directory and it gets refiled and renamed the same way.
Then keep backups so it doesn't just vanish some day.
Another key, whether you manually file it or scan it, is to get some kind of routine going so that incoming paper doesn't pile up, it quickly becomes overwhelming.
We use a raven scanner connected to Dropbox. Scan and toss.
STM317
PowerDork
6/12/23 7:32 p.m.
I try to shred most of it, but some things are kept until they're no longer needed, or rotated through as new ones arrive old copies are shredded.
What I do keep is in a filing cabinet like this, which I think has more style than the typical tan metal ones:
Two-drawer file cabinet owner here as well. Mine’s unpainted and then cleared, so it looks kinda cool. Brand is Hon.
I've got a big ugly three drawer lateral filing cabinet in the closet it my home office. Close the closet door and it looks great.
David S. Wallens said:
Two-drawer file cabinet owner here as well. Mine’s unpainted and then cleared, so it looks kinda cool. Brand is Hon.
Mine has a bunch of Rockauto magnets and various race car stickers stuck to it. :)
I just throw it all out. YOLO.
