How To Avoid Paper Management Mistakes–Part 2: Fat Vs. Skinny Jeans
Last week, in How To Avoid Paper Management Mistakes–Part 1, we noted that while rewards for doing as we ought can inspire many of us to organize our space, time and resources, the rest of us do best when a cautionary tale warns us against dangerous mistakes. We already touched on two such mistakes:
Mistake #1: You Have No Physical System At All
Mistake #2: You Have No Behavioral System In Place
Today, we continue with guidelines for what to avoid in our paper lives:
Mistake #3: You Toss Just About Every Piece of Paper in the Trash
Certainly tossing all of your paper in the trash, without sorting, maintaining or organizing any of it has one advantage — you will never drown in paper clutter. However, discarding all paper that crosses your path has the potential to create a number of problems because much of our paper is, indeed, necessary for functioning in the 21st century.
Legal Distress — Maintaining legal and/or certain types of financial documentation can keep you out of trouble with the IRS or the police, and may protect your interests in cases of civil litigation. Such issues include tax returns and supporting material, insurance policies, records of sale of property, real estate, and cars in order to prove legal ownership, etc. Proving identity and citizenship can also be very difficult in the absence of the proper paperwork.
Financial Disarray — Although many records are available online, not all are accessible after a period of time (sometimes six months, in the case of bank statements). Although you know you paid off your student loans or your mortgage, poor record-keeping on the part of lenders can lead to harassment and even errant foreclosures until or unless you can provide verifiable proof. Indeed, the importance of accessing certain paperwork for legal and financial reasons is the notion behind our periodic Paper Doll series, Lost and Found:
Lost and Found: Social Security Statements
Lost And Found: Tax Returns (and memories of 9th grade science class)
Lost And Found: Savings Bonds (and saving yourself a headache later on)
Lost And Found: A Different Kind of Stock (Certificate) Tip
Lost and Found: GONE in 6 seconds: Your Wallet!
Identity Theft — We’ve had frequent discussions regarding the dangers of identity theft:
Will The Real Paper Doll Please Stand Up? (Organizing to Prevent Identity Theft)
A Boy Named Sue May Hate His Name (but that doesn’t mean you can steal it!)
The Big OUCH!!! (Medical Identity Theft–Part 1)
Doctor, It Hurts When Total Strangers Do This! (Medical Identity Theft, part 2)
and it always bears repeating that proper shredding (instead of just tossing) of paperwork containing personal information is one key to maintaining your good name, as we reviewed in:
Shredding the Documents: Finding Your Shredding Solution
Of course, maintaining a system of paperwork isn’t limited to serious documents. It’s also important to evaluate the relative value of reference paperwork, which includes those items that will help improve quality of life. Examples include family medical records and professional and educational history and records.
Sentimental items should also be considered. While it may seem that Paper Doll spends a good deal of time discouraging you from keeping some types of sentimental papers:
Hallmark Holidays and American Greetings: Cutting Card Clutter
Whistler’s Mommy Invites Grandchild Moses and Raggedy Andy Warhol for a Playdate
careful readers will note that I’ve never argued in favor of a records retention schedule (of which, more later) for sentimental paperwork, and in fact usually push for preservation of the kinds of paper that warm our hearts:
A Valentine to Paper
Zing Went the Strings of My Heart: Organizing Your Love Letters
True emotional attachment, even more so than storage space, should be the primary guiding principle in maintaining papers of sentimental value.
Thus, you can’t just toss out all the paper. Many documents must be saved for legal or financial reasons, and while certain types can be maintained in digital form, the papers themselves ought not to be tossed, but destroyed, to protect against identity theft (and, in the case of imprudent love letters, public scandal).
Mistake #4: You Save Everything Until the Paper Crowds You Out
Are your files overstuffed? With our physical health, a precursor to medical problems like diabetes or high blood pressure is expanded girth. Excessive weight, in and of itself, seems like an aesthetic problem, but it often portends more serious difficulties. Similarly, if you save every document (even if you’ve avoided Mistake #1 of having no physical system), your paper management storage space is likely to be quickly overgrown, and your patience with sticking with a behavioral system (and avoiding Mistake #2) will almost certainly be exhausted.
Thus, saving every piece of paper that comes into your life is hardly better than saving nothing at all. At least if you rid yourself of every piece of paper (even that which you need for legal or financial reasons), you actually know what you’re missing…because you’ve tossed it all. But, if you can’t let your fingers do the walking because there’s not a bit of space to add a piece of paper, let alone get your hands around a hanging file to pull it out and review it, your system is overweight.
Yes, just as we can move from skinny jeans to fat-day jeans, we can increase the size of our paper management storage space. However, just as we know that Chico’s sizing of 0, 1, 2 and 3 in lieu of standard sizing of 2-16 is merely placating our egos, we know darn well that adding another file crate or cabinet is not the solution to all of our paper troubles.
Overstuffed filing systems come from making the following mini-mistakes:
Mini-Mistake #4A: You Never Purge Your System — Let’s go back to the closet example from last week. In your wardrobe, if you never review what clothing you have, never let go of items that no longer fit or are out of fashion, then when your drawers get full, you are likely to start piling new (or just newly washed) clothes on top of your dresser, on the floor, and on end tables until your clothing organizing system collapses.
With your paper, clutter will similarly mount if no time is made to review what you own. Echoing our wardrobe example, give special attention to the things that no longer “fit” or are “out of fashion” in your financial, household and personal sections of your family filing system. While most of your legal and medical documentation will likely be maintained long-term, these other areas should be pruned annually.
–For financial documents, use a solid records retention schedule from your CPA or pick up my ebook, Do I Have To Keep This Piece of Paper?
–For household paperwork, make sure that the manuals you keep represent appliances you still own, and consider moving to digital solutions, such as we discussed here:
Put Manuals on Automatic–Organizing Owner’s Manuals (Part 1-Paper)
Put Manuals on Automatic–Organizing Digital Owner’s Manuals (Part 2)
[Editor’s Note: As of 2018, there are newer posts on this topic, including:
Paper Doll’s Manual Override – Part 1: Declutter and Organize Owner’s Manuals
Paper Doll’s Manual Override – Part 2: Twelve Resources To Find An Owner’s Manual
Paper Doll’s Manual Override – Part 3: Create & Organize A Digital Owner’s Manual Library
–For personal filing, practice will help you hone your own internal records retention schedule. With your personal history, you’ll soon see that keeping 20 copies of a ten-year-old resume is impractical. You might decide to go digital or keep a resume file with one resume reflecting each major career transition, to help you maintain awareness of your successes and growth.
In terms of your personal interest, be ruthless — five-year-old restaurant reviews or ten-year-old travel articles are unlikely to reflect current times, and much of the “informational” paperwork you’ve saved on a variety of subjects can be found in more updated searches on the internet.
Before letting yourself keep a non-legal, non-financial reference item, ask yourself:
What’s the worst that can happen if I let go of this piece of paper?
Where can I find this information if I don’t save the paper?
Ponder what we discussed last week, in terms of scheduling an annual review of your files, and remember to block small segments of time for purging papers so that you don’t burn yourself out. (Leave intensive organizing sessions to the professionals!)
Mini-Mistake #4B: You Save Unnecessary Filler — I tell clients that when they process the mail, outer envelopes and “shiny stuff” (advertising materials) should be the first to go into the trash. Unless you’re saving an outer envelope to indicate a postmark of date-of-receipt for legal purposes, your paper management filing system should be largely free of envelopes, and entirely free of “stuffer” material. Don’t pay with your space to help them advertise to you!
Mini-Mistake #4C: You Don’t Store Papers Flat — Unfold whatever you’re filing. A six-page brokerage statement folded in half takes up twice as much depth in the filing cabinet as it would if it were unfolded, but none of the height or width space is recouped. Plus, every time you need to search for a document, you’ll have to pull out the entire folder and unfold each document until you find what you want.
If you must fold a legal sized document to make it fit your letter-sized system, fold up only the bottom quarter and make a tight crease — the vital data (names, addresses, account numbers, dates) will almost certainly be visible at the top.
Things may disappear on the internet, but that’s why Mr. Peabody and his boy, Sherman, came along with the Wayback Machine.
In one form or another, whatever is on the web is permanent. There’s just too much to print. Trust that without printing, you’ll be able to find what you need. Review what we’ve discussed here:
Site-Saving Bookmarklets: Keeping Up With Online Reading While Reducing Paper Clutter
and if you’re still not ready to go print-free, try an experiment similar to that we use with clients who compulsively shop.
Keep a notebook and each time you are tempted to print out an email or web page to go directly into filing system (i.e., you’re not taking the document with you to a meeting or on a trip), scribble a note in your notebook regarding what you would have printed and where it is (saved on your hard drive, bookmarked in your browser, etc.) If, after a month, you still feel a strong urge to print and file, go ahead, but at least you’ll have given yourself a Time-Out to carefully consider the move.
Mini-Mistake #4E: You Leave No Room For the Future — When overhauling your system, and periodically, during maintenance, aim to keep 20% of your drawer space available for expansion. When you’re down to less than a fist’s worth of space, it’ll be harder to slide hanging files along the rails. If you can’t slide the files behind the file you want away from you, or the files in front of the one you want towards you, giving your file enough wiggle room to let you expand it with the flick of a finger to allow you to drop items at the front or rear, then your system is too tight.
Again, it’s like your closet. If you return from the dry cleaners with a freshly laundered blouse but the hangers are so tightly packed that you can’t slide them to the left or right, you’ll give up on putting away the blouse where it ought to go, and you’ll plop it down anywhere, leading to a dysfunctional mess.
Next week, we’ll finish up paper management mistakes by looking at labeling and how to balance the content in your files so that they are neither too narrow nor too all-encompassing, enabling you to chunk saved papers into reasonably-sized portions — the paper equivalent of skinny jeans.
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