Best Results Organizing

[In October, 2007, I embarked on the original Paper Doll blog with a post setting out what I planned to do. It seemed sensible to go back to the beginning to get a sense of where we’ve been, and where the blog will be heading. Ms. Ephron may be gone, but she’s definitely not forgotten.]

I’m reading I Feel Bad About My Neck by the brilliant Nora Ephron, famed wit and screenwriter of my favorite movie, When Harry Met Sally. Ephron writes:

Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don’t mean to be too literal about this. There are a couple of old boyfriends whom I always worry about bumping into, but there’s no chance–if I ever did–that I would recognize either of them…But the point is that I still think about them every time I’m tempted to leave the house without eyeliner.

Organizing your papers is basic life maintenance — very much like the kind of beauty maintenance Ephron is talking about, and every bit as important as looking FABULOUS to the former romantic partner who once foolishly cast you aside. Think of maintaining your papers on a regular basis as an insurance policy against losing money, time, productivity, serenity and self-esteem. Ephron imagines the ensuing result of skipping maintenance; to her, going out sans eyeliner is the 21st century variation on your mother’s warning to wear clean underwear in case you are in an accident.

So paper maintenance is an insurance policy, only instead of spending money betting against yourself in hopes you’ll never have to collect, you invest your time and effort in creating a workable system for handling incoming papers, archiving reference items, acting on the urgent or important tasks the papers represent and purging whatever is unnecessary. It sounds like a lot of work, but once your system is in place, paper maintenance is easier than applying eyeliner.

A big part of paper maintenance is knowing what papers you have and giving them permanent homes. First, there are your essential legal, medical and financial VIPs (Very Important Papers) like birth certificates, car titles or immunization records. Failing to keep these in a safe place from which they can be quickly and easily accessed will detract from your security and life satisfaction in much the same way running into an old beau while dressed in too-tight, tomato-sauce-spotted sweats can shrink your self-esteem to the size of a dust particle.

Perhaps you imagine that if you ever lose your passport in the sedimentary rock-like layers of your desk, it’s no big deal, because you can always get a new one. However, due to new regulations requiring that American citizens have passports even to visit Canada, the Department of State has been overwhelmed. It used to take weeks to get a new passport or renew one; now, it’s taking two and a half months or more. And lest you think you won’t mind paying the cost to expedite delivery, it’s no longer a small fee. To get your passport expedited (that is, to get it in the amount of time it used to take without a rush job) will cost you $60, plus the cost of expedited delivery service to send it to the passport office and then to receive your passport once it’s processed. This is on top of the $97 in fees you’re already paying to get the passport. Do you want to spend weeks worried that your family vacation or vital business trip is in jeopardy just because you’ve let your papers think they’re allowed to play Hide and Seek?

A worst-case scenario for failing to effectively maintain the papers in your life is identity theft. Even with all the hubbub over Internet (in)security, the most popular source of stolen personal information is still dumpster-diving. If you throw out the wrong documents and compound it by failing to shred sensitive data, or even if you just carry your Social Security card in your wallet instead of filing it safely away, you open yourself to being one of the 9.3 million Americans victimized by identity theft each year.

In most cases, thieves just use your credit card number, so keeping organized financial records and quickly alerting the credit card company means minimal financial loss. Maintaining your paper records keeps you solvent and lets you resolve the problem quickly, inexpensively and relatively painlessly. But in the more extreme cases, identity thieves can create an alternative version of you from purloined information and can ruin your credit rating, keep you from getting credit, insurance and jobs, and can even lead to your arrest if someone commits a felony using your forged identity. That certainly puts being seen by an ex while wearing your laundry-day outfit in perspective!

Papers document our lives and give us access to everything we want and deserve. Easily accessed proof of auto registration and insurance may be the difference between that traffic cop being a darling or a devil. Carefully maintained financial records keep the taxman at bay. Quickly-found immunization records mean children can attend school; conversely, lost permission slips don’t just mean your kids miss out on a trip to see how maple sugar gets made – they’ll miss out on the in-jokes that will be a part of in-group history. Not to place a guilt trip, but your paper maintenance skills will impact your children’s permanent record.

There are papers you want and need (legal, financial, medical); papers you want, but don’t need (old letters, school transcripts that prove you once knew why a participle shouldn’t dangle); papers you need but don’t want (bills that need to be paid, reminders for an upcoming dental appointment); and papers you don’t need and don’t want, but haven’t yet tossed (expired coupons, twenty-year-old notes on mitosis or Descartes).

Maintaining the papers of your life may not be fun, and unless you’re a certain breed of professional organizer, it may not be entertaining. But it is essential. That’s why, over the coming blog posts, Paper Doll will be sharing tips to make it easy to keep the unwanted paper away and easier to determine where and how to maintain the rest of the documentary evidence of your time on the planet.

I don’t guarantee I’ll be as witty as Nora Ephron. But like Ephron’s eyeliner, your mother’s clean underwear and your auto insurance policy, paper maintenance means your life will run more smoothly, and whatever catastrophes you encounter will be less catastrophic. And, if I might steal a line from Ephron’s movie, no identity thief will be able to say “I’ll have what she’s having.”