Best Results Organizing

Last week, we talked about how easy it can be to get your filing done, if only each item has a home. When I mentioned that everything fits perfectly in one of five categories:

• Financial
• Legal
• Medical
• Household
• Personal

I received protestations that some items that could not possibly fit into these categories. So, I offer a guarantee…whoever writes in will get a response right here at Paper Doll to show how various and sundry items in need of filing can fit one of these five categories. Yes, even last year’s Christmas budget. Yes, even baptismal certificates. Yes, even instructions on how to change the time on the VCR now that Congress has confused us all with new Daylight Savings Time schedules.

Today, we’ll start with our first category…please return each week, as we’ll be continuing this subject in future posts.

FINANCIAL paperwork is any family’s largest section, because most of the paper we get is in service to little green pieces of paper of which we wish we could keep more. Generally, financial files keep track of money coming IN, money going OUT, and the money that we are GROWING for future needs. The financial paperwork we receive or create usually breaks down into these sub-categories:

OUTGOING MONEY
Monthly and/or regular statements regarding the money you’re sending away—what businesses call ACCOUNTS PAYABLE. When you get a bill, you tear off the stub to mail back with your payment (assuming you’re not doing online bill-pay), and are left with the larger, non-stub portion from:

• Monthly or periodic household/family bills (e.g., rent/mortgage, utilities, insurance, etc.)
• Credit cards statements
• Loans (e.g., home equity, auto, college, personal, etc.)
• Medical bills (for which you have an ongoing payment plan)
• Anything else being paid on a regular or predictable basis (e.g., piano lessons, tuition, personal chef, professional organizer, fitness trainer) for which you wish to keep careful records

Label a hanging folder (or a few, if necessary) for each sub-category, and then label (and alphabetize) your interior folders within each sub-sub-category. It doesn’t matter if you use generic terms (cable, power, water) or company-specific (Comcast, MyCity Power, Valley Water Authority)…just be sure to choose labels that reflect how you think. If your system is complicated, you’ll find excuses not to use it. Stay simple.

For credit cards, if you have more than one card from any one issuing company, you may want to put the last four digits of the card number on the label (Discover -1234, Discover -9876), just to help you file quickly.

INCOMING MONEY
Information regarding incoming revenue comes next—in business, we call these ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE. (If you have an actual business, keep financial files separate from family/personal files. This will be a subject of a future post.)

For most of us, incoming revenue reflects pay stubs from employment, but this sub-category can also include alimony or child support payments, Social Security income, disability payments, IRA disbursements, personal loan repayments (to you), lottery winnings and stock-dividends (if not part of a dividend reimbursement plan). If you’re regularly getting money from any source, or have gotten a large lump sum for something other than employment, this is where you should keep your records.

TRANSITIONAL MONEY
Some financial records represent what you are doing to your money, but others show what your money is doing, with or without you. Bank statements for checking, savings, and trusts represent collections of funds that are often in transition. They may accrue interest or have fees associated with them, so take time each month to make sure these accounts reflect what you think they should.

Brokerage statements reflect investment information. You’ll separate these by investment type: retirement, college savings, goal-related (like a vacation fund or Christmas Club account), first, and further sub-categorize (and alphabetize) by company. So, in the Retirement hanging folder, you might have interior folders for your 401(k), an old 403(b), IRAs with Fidelity and Vanguard, and so on. Each account will have its own folder.

SIMULATED MONEY
Do you ever wonder what to do with paper that isn’t money, but is nonetheless valuable? This subcategory is generally where you’ll keep records reflecting monetary value. It’s not money in your pocket, but it’s the equivalent.

These files might include quarterly or annual statements reflecting either regular or atypical benefit plans for your job, such as if you’re vested in an employee-ownership stock program.

You can also have a folder in this section for gift certificates, gift cards and store credits so you can keep track of what monetary value you posses or are owed.

However, do not keep stock certificates, Bearer Bonds, or other valuable paperwork in your general family files. Papers of significant value should either be kept in your safe deposit box or in a fire-proof safe.

TAXES
When dealing with taxes, you want to first consider what you’ll need to prepare your upcoming tax returns.

For the CURRENT year, I always suggest having at least one tax-prep folder, but you can expand upon that idea and have one for medical expense records, one for charitable donation records and a third for “other” tax deductible items. This January, when you start receiving W-2s and 1099s, you should immediately carry them to your filing system and pop them in your TAX PREP 2007 file folders.

While you must maintain careful tax records and supporting information, you only need to keep the most recent year or two in your active family/personal files. If you’re short on space, everything else can go into easily-accessed file archives, such as in a banker’s box.

FINANCIAL HISTORY and LIFE
It’s important to maintain control over your financial and credit history. To do this, check and download your free credit reports from the three major credit bureaus on an annual basis. You can keep them in a folder entitled Credit History (isn’t that creative?) – it’s not necessary to keep a separate folder for each report from Equifax, Experian and Trans-Union.

This is the ideal sub-section to keep your Social Security statement folder. Each year, approximately six weeks prior to your birthday, the Social Security Administration mails you a statement of the current status of your account. (It’s printed in black and green ink on white paper and looks like a short brochure.) It’s important to save these statements to plan your retirement needs; be sure to check the accuracy of the statement before filing it away each year.

[Editor’s note: Since the original publication date, Social Security has ceased mailing statements; you can access your statement online, as we discussed previously. Printing copies, or making PDFs of them, so that you can keep your own records, is still a good idea.]

This sub-section would also be where you could keep a printout of your monthly budget spreadsheet or holiday budget, your Big Ticket receipt file to keep track of information on large purchases, as well as any other records you have regarding your financial history or plans.

For each of these sub-categories, within each folder, it’s usually best to file in reverse chronological order. You’re more likely to need to quickly access something that’s recently been filed.

That’s it. Your financial files represent money going out, money coming in, money sitting around (and hopefully growing), pseudo-money, the money information you have to provide to the government…and the history of your financial life.

Since we’re talking about finances, the question always arises, “What do I do about receipts?” Next week is Thanksgiving, and you’re likely to amass a large number of receipts on “Black Friday“, so we’ll be finishing our conversation on financial files by talking about keeping receipts.

Coming up after Thanksgiving: Legal and Medical files

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”

I’m sure you’ll be scandalized to hear this, but even professional organizers procrastinate. As much as I love organizing papers and files for my clients and am Johnny-on-the-spot with my business files, I’ve been known to delay filing my personal papers. On Sunday, unwilling to let the To File box taunt me any longer, I decided I’d start the Month of Gratitude by being thankful the papers were put away. If you’re worried about clearing the paper clutter before the holidays, read on…

These loose papers were the same kind you have: credit card and utility statements, insurance company explanations of benefits, an automobile club renewal confirmation, thank-you letters from charities and the odd magazine clipping profiling a dream vacation. And while I procrastinated on three months’ worth of filing (in the same way I find every excuse to avoid emptying the dishwasher), I was happy in the knowledge that it would be a completely painless task.

How long did it take me to file away three months’ worth of papers?

42 minutes. It took the entirety of Face the Nation (Bob Schieffer is my silver-haired imaginary TV Newsman Boyfriend) plus a dozen minutes of SpongeBobSquarePants. (Hey, how can a girl resist a guy who lives in a pineapple under the sea?)

Why was it such a quick and easy job?

Certainly not due to any miraculous Professional Organizer genes. But I’ve got a great system. Just as we can empty the dishwasher seemingly by rote because we know exactly where everything goes, filing away personal papers can be a snap if each item has a home.

And it wasn’t quick and easy because I have some fancy filing cabinet that fills me with aesthetic delight–I don’t! I keep my personal files in a plastic milk-crate style filing box, which I bought for $6.99. A large family with complex financial or legal dealings might want multiple file crates, or might want to invest in a filing cabinet or lockable file box, but it’s easiest to start small.

To get your personal/family files in order, you just need these basics:

1) A container that holds hanging folders
Choose as simple or as fancy as you like, from a cardboard bankers box to a plastic crate to a metal or wood filing cabinet. If you’re often mobile, you can even try a portable file box on wheels.

2) Hanging folders
Choose the standard (ugly) green, enjoy multi-colored versions even if you don’t plan to color-code, or pick something high-falutin’ for inspiration. Hanging folders divide the major sections or categories, but if colors and patterns increase your motivation, go for it!

3) Interior folders
Again, it doesn’t matter if you stick with plain vanilla manila, or go for pretty and fancy, as long as you use the folders to separate the sub-categories of your life-on-paper.

4) A labelmaker
This can be your hand-held thick Sharpie, or you can opt for something a little higher tech.

5) Trust in yourself that the piles of papers will soon be conquered.

In the coming posts, Paper Doll is going to help you transform your filing system (or lack thereof) into a simple structure.  It’ll be sensible and as easy as (eating) pie to get your reference papers off the dining table and filed away so they’ll be easily retrievable in the future.

There are many filing systems out there to fit every personality. Filing merely seems difficult because there are so many options. Clients ask me—should everything be alphabetical? Should I separate files for my kids from my own? Should I use a numerical system like Paper Tiger for my household papers? Maybe you have no filing system or maybe you have a complex one that frustrates you. It doesn’t matter how you’ve dealt with papers in the past—this month is a clean slate.

There are no hard and fast rules regarding where you have to keep documents–the home office or the kitchen, upstairs or downstairs; the point is that papers must be kept where you can retrieve them quickly and logically. This includes labeling folders clearly so that they make sense to you.

In Paper Doll World, simplicity and ease of access is key, and that starts with keeping related things together, rather than necessarily alphabetizing or assigning arbitrary numbers. Family (or, if you’re a singleton like me, personal) files are based on just five MAIN categories:

• Financial—money in, money out, money you’ll get when you’re Bob Schieffer’s age, taxes and your financial history
• Legal—the VIPs (very important papers) and contracts that keep you protected
• Medical—your personal medical history (but not the medial bills)
• Household—everything to keep your household running, from product manuals to remodeling plans
• Personal—your educational and career history, plus all your personal interests.

That’s it! Absolutely every personal or family reference paper will fit one of these categories–there’s no need for the stress-inducing “miscellaneous” category. In the next few posts, I’ll be talking about the specifics of what belongs in each of these areas. For now, just collect your essentials, pull all your loose reference papers (i.e., the stuff for which the only To Do is “to file”) in one stack, and I’ll meet you back here next Tuesday…without delay!

“This recipe is certainly silly. It says to separate the eggs, but it doesn’t say how far to separate them.”

I like to imagine that Gracie Allen’s kitchen was much like her on-screen persona: charming, but a bit addled…with mismatched paper scraps fluttering around her like so much snowy flaked coconut.

Even when we eliminate all the things that don’t belong in our kitchens, our Food HQs are often littered with clipped and copied recipes, cooking magazines, regular and diet-related cookbooks, and more. Kitchen clutter is often a sticky mess, preventing us from ever finding the perfect recipe when we want or need it.

The toys and clothes that surround us may no longer be age-appropriate, size-appropriate or lifestyle-appropriate. Similarly, we can outgrow cookbooks, diets and recipes that once fit us so well. It may be time to part amicably with Macrobiotic for a Groovy Life or 172 Ways To Lose Weight With Grapefruit. To downsize your own cookbook collection, ask yourself:

Have I used a recipe from this cookbook in the past year?

If you use the cookbook heavily, even in just one season, keep it. If you seek it out frequently but only for the same one or two recipes, copy out what you use and set the cookbooks free. And, if you can’t remember the last time you opened it, the book has become a stranger in your home—send it away. Your options are to:

• Donate the cookbook to your local library book sale or a book-related charity (or even Harvard)
• Sell it at a local used book store or online
• Store it elsewhere than your kitchen. If you have the bookshelf space elsewhere in your home, store extraneous cookbooks as you would history or reference books.

In the future, test-drive a cookbook to see if it’s a good fit by borrowing it from friends or the library before making a purchase.

For the piles of loose recipes clipped out of magazines or copied after tasting a friend’s culinary triumph, select one recipe at a time and follow these simple rules:

1) SEPARATE DREAMS FROM REALITY: Will I ever really cook this?

We have to be honest with ourselves and realize that if the fanciest thing we cook is spaghetti, we’re not really going to be dabbling in egg drop soup or meringue flamb from scratch. If your lifestyle is such that you, your spouse and your kids aren’t home until 15 minutes before stomachs start rumbling, cookbooks concentrating on dishes that require all-day loving attention just don’t fit your lifestyle.

If the photos with those recipes are truly dazzling but out of your reach, create a “Dream Recipes” folder to keep in your files along with dream vacations and dream decorating ideas. You can preserve the dream without cluttering your kitchen.

2) DIVIDE AND CONQUER: Under what category does this recipe fall?
Pretend you’re a cookbook editor and come up with some major categories, and then add the ones that fit your family’s dining style:

• Appetizers
• Salads
• Entres
• Desserts
• Ethnic meals (sub-divided by region)
• Holiday food
• Picnic meals
• Allergy-free recipes
  

Once you have a healthy stack for each category (and are certain you’re really going to attempt to cook each item), you’re ready for the final step.

3) PUBLISH YOUR OWN COOKBOOK:

Buy a fat three-ring notebook and a box of transparent, plastic sheet protectors and slide the recipes into the sheet protectors. If a recipe is continued on the back of a page, you’ll be able to see the front and reverse easily; if the recipe is continued on another page, place it back to back with the prior page. The sheet protectors keep the recipes from getting damaged or sticky and can be easily cleaned with a sponge. Use simple subject dividers to separate the categories.

If you’re not a do-it-yourselfer, consider this pre-made Cookbook Binder Tabs Kit from OnlineOrganizing.com.

And don’t forget, the Internet can often replace printed recipes. For example, sometimes you can just type a short list of ingredients into Google, and you’ll be led to various recipe options. You can also search for recipes at these helpful sites, often by recipe name, category or just ingredients:

• Epicurious
• Reluctant Gourmet
• The Food Network
• For a list of many other recipe sites, check out Best Cooking Sites.

Keep the recipe clutter to a minimum — you’ll have more space to cook and dine well, and you’ll have more time to enjoy your meals and dining companions.

Say goodnight, Gracie!

Today’s quote yields two important points. First, love is eternal. Awwww.

Second, it shows that paper is not love, and the things written on paper (with the exception of declarations of love) are not deserving of so much of our space, time and effort that we inconvenience ourselves and our loved ones to make room for the scraps of dead trees and cellulose.

I have a wonderful client who has incorporated many organizing systems and skills into his repertoire, and his life is far improved from the clutter-laden stress cubicle I first encountered. However, he’s had one habit of which we could not break him: writing everything on small scraps of paper.

Mr. Wonderful Client operates two businesses: a brick-and-mortar retail operation with multiple locations and a multi-level marketing company for which he has literally thousands of contacts. He’s also actively involved in his incredibly-adorable children’s lives and is a devoted husband, son, brother and friend, a volunteer for his alma mater and his house of worship, and a man with many disparate interests.

Even if you didn’t know these things before you saw his office, a cursory glance at the mountains of loose scraps of Post-It notes, scribbled envelopes, doodled napkins and notes on the peripheries of unrelated faxes would clue you in to all the activities and thoughts pressing upon him.

I advised multiple techniques to downsize his excess scraps:

• Carry one notepad everywhere (attached to a clipboard if necessary) and put every new subject, conversation notes or transcribed message on a new page, with a date-stamp (and time-stamp, if helpful). Follow up each issue on that particular page until you can tear it off and either file it as archival, use it as a task reminder in a tickler file or throw it away.

• If you can’t write on an actual notepad (say, if you’re in restaurants, the restroom or on the golf course), use a cell phone to leave messages for OfficeYou while you’re being MobileYou.

• Regarding tasks and phone numbers, once back at the office, instead of transcribing messages onto scraps, immediately program phone numbers into a PDA or your computer’s contact management software to bypass paper altogether.

• To capture information quickly, use the memo option on a cell phone to record quick reminders or contact information. Then, set a daily alarm right on the cell phone to remind you to listen to your messages and copy the information to where it belongs.

Mr. Wonderful Client doesn’t favor high-tech solutions, but anyone addicted to loose papers could also:

• Create all notes digitally as text messages and then text or email them to email account accessible at any computer.

• Invest in an 21st century magic, like the Logitech IO2 Digital Pen. With this device, you take your notes with a special pen and paper, and your handwriting is stored for later uploading into the computer for use in a word processing document, spreadsheet, contact management program or presentation software. Basically, your handwriting magically becomes typed text!

Mr. Wonderful Client became adept at keeping himself from writing TASKS on scraps of paper and succeeded at using his tickler file to keep all his action-oriented papers flowing smoothly as I’d taught him.

But the snowy flutter of minuscule papers bearing phone numbers and small details (price quotes, confirmation numbers, etc.) continued unabated until one magical day. As we worked our way through a small pile, it struck me that perhaps his own devotion to his wife, family and gentlemanly upbringing could work in our favor. I wasn’t sure how he’d take it, but I said I thought I had a solution to the loose paper issue.

I shouted “NO MORE FLOOZIES!”

He titled his head in confusion.

“Stick with me, here. Y’know how a good man, such as yourself, may sometimes feel passionate and want a kiss?” This giant of a man blushed and nodded.

“But you love your wife and are magnificently devoted. No matter how much you want a kiss, you’re not going to grab any loose woman who saunters by. You’re going to wait until you can take your wife in your arms. Those loose women are floozies, and they’re bad for you…LOOSE PAPERS are FLOOZIES, and your notepad and message system is like your wife. Stay faithful!”

My client’s wife (that would be Mrs. Gorgeous Model-Client) was nearby and suggested that she could be supportive by threatening to give him a (playful) slap every time she saw him “cheat” with the floozies.

Silly? Absolutely. A perfect solution? Absolutely not. But the key to all organizing systems is that they must be customized to the user.

Be willing to experiment and personalize your approach. Don’t worry if the organizing system in a best-selling book or taught by a famous professional organizer isn’t perfect for you—allow yourself to be creative and develop a narrative or mythology that works for your mindset.

To be faithful to any system, perhaps you need to step beyond the plain notepad to find yourself the right trophy spouse with which to collect your notes. Fun options include:

• A phone message book works well for tracking contact information until it gets into a more permanent system.

• Consider some pretty and artsy notepads. (Note: if you’re like me and are hesitant to write in a notebook that’s too darn pretty, under the rubric of “Oh, I can’t cut that beautiful cake and ruin the lovely frosting”, stick with plain yellow legal pads. The last thing you need is a stack of fancy but unused bound paper.)
  

• If you’re not ready to skip paper altogether, but really need to have your information saved digitally, look into that Logitech IO2 Digital Pen. Just don’t ask Paper Doll how it works.
  

If loose papers are the bane of your existence, remember that paper is not love, and be faithful: steer clear of floozies!

Last week, I quoted Nora Ephron; this week, I’d like to quote another witty and wise lady, Sheila Bestry:

Although my mother is undoubtedly referencing illness, bad dates and other tsuris when she says this, the philosophy is entirely applicable to paper.

Look around you. Look at all the paper that you have, but do not want. It could be catalogs that tempt you into spending money (little green paper) that you don’t have, or junk mail telling you that you “may have already won” (although you assuredly have not). If you’re not careful, these papers fill up your mailboxes, car passenger seats, desktops and kitchen counters.

I tend to worry at the micro level – I want each one of you to achieve serenity and dispel chaos – but for those of you who are concerned about living green, all of these papers we don’t want create problems at the macro level, too. According to the Clean Air Council, the average American uses 650 pounds of paper a year and Americans trash enough office paper to build a 12-foot wall from Los Angeles to New York City. The Council also reports that U.S. businesses now use about 21 million tons of paper every year. How much less waste could there be if we all just stopped getting the paper we don’t want?

Be a gatekeeper! Start by preventing as much as possible of this unwanted paper from coming your way. Contact the Direct Marketing Association. They offer two options for removing yourself from mailing lists. You can apply online, for which you will pay $1 for processing via a secure credit card purchase. The alternative is to print a form from their site and mail it to:

Mail Preference Service
Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 643
Carmel, NY 10512

Getting your name from the DMA’s lists will be a great first start, but don’t stop there. Next, go to Abacus Opt Out. From there, you’ll see instructions for writing (via slowmail) to be removed from the lists sent to their affiliates.

Both the DMA and Abacus are great starts for paring down general junk mail. But what about credit card applications? Are you troubled by all the offers that come to your mailbox? You should be, and not only because the promise of more credit is as seductive as George Clooney.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse often reports that dumpster- and mailbox-diving are major sources of identity theft. Instead of dealing with the massive influx of applications that need to be shredded or worrying that an offer will be stolen from your mailbox, wouldn’t it be better to avoid receiving the sneaky paper offers altogether?

Call 1-888-5OPTOUT or visit OptOutPreScreen.com stop those credit card offers in their tracks.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act allows consumer credit reporting companies like Equifax, Trans-Union and Experian (the same agencies that determine your credit score) to share your name on lists used by credit card, lending and insurance companies so they can tender offers of credit or insurance to you. Stop the credit reporting companies from sharing your data by “opting out” and you’ll eliminate the chance of identity thieves going shopping in your mailbox.

The site and automated phone system will ask you to enter your phone number, Social Security number, and other personal information to locate your record. If you’re uncomfortable supplying this information to an automated system, you will have to call each of the major credit bureaus individually to be removed from their lists. I cast no aspersions, but it stands to reason that you might be better off trusting a computer, with no kids to put through college, then having a human being take down your personal data.

Using the OptOutPrescreen site or phone number, you can choose to opt out of these credit offers for five years at a time (in case you might want offers of credit down the line), or have your name permanently removed. If you want permanent removal, though, you’ll have to print the document at the web site and mail it the old fashioned way. Yes, they’re making it easier, but they’re not about to lose their bread and butter by making it too easy!

One note: the OptOutPreScreen applies only to the credit bureaus. It does NOT apply to all the information your individual credit card companies and insurers share with their affiliates and partners. To further limit the paper clutter sent to you, contact each financial entity, per the instructions in their privacy notices, to assert your privacy rights. (But if you aren’t going to assert your privacy rights, you may as well throw out the little tri-folder “privacy notice” papers. You’ll get another chance next year.)

Most of the paper you have that you don’t want is there because someone else sent it to you. But what about the paper you generate? Finally, you can get rid of all those loose slips of paper where you’ve transcribed voicemail messages, only to realize you’ve painstakingly copied down the name and phone number, not of a potential love interest or employer, but a telemarketer.

Take advantage of the Federal Trade Commission’s brilliant Do Not Call Registry. You can either call 888-382-1222 or fill in the quick form at DoNotCall.gov to have your home and cell phones removed from telemarketers’ lists. Just remember that removal from the lists lasts only five years from the date of registration, so make yourself a note on your perpetual calendar to re-register in 2012.

Do you have other slips of paper you don’t want, the kind with just phone numbers but no identifying names? Don’t forget that if a phone number is a listed number (in a public directory), you can type it with area code into Google to yield information regarding to whom the number belongs. No more mystery numbers! Trash those scraps!

Lastly, you may wonder about those for-pay companies, like Greendimes.com — the ones which promise to help the environment and reduce your junk mail load, all for a small fee. I wonder about them too, but am wary of spending any money when free or practically-free methods, like those listed above, work so well. But be assured the Paper Doll will continue researching and report back when I hear more.

For now, follow the steps above to limit the paper you don’t want. Then, in the time you used to spend cursing all that unwanted paper, think about your life, and be thankful you don’t have what you don’t want.