It’s that time of year isn’t it? Everywhere I look someone is talking about how to organize and clean, or purge things. Which I love. But, sometimes things can be a little or a lot vague.
As we all know, I need a plan to follow or nothing is going to be accomplished. I can say all day long, I need to organize all those papers…… Unless I have a direction and a objective for getting those papers organized, I might as well just leave them sitting in the pile.
So! I thought I’d share one of my practices that keep me from being buried alive by all of the paperwork that comes into our house.
I have a large filing cabinet that I keep in my living room. It looks like a piece of furniture and I love it. It boggles my Mama’s mind. She says I’m just like my Papaw Calvin. One of the many, many reasons I loved that man. He was a keeper and a filer like me. That’s where anything that I need to keep ends up. Tax paperwork, school records, the last years bills that I still get in paper form, things like that.
Someone very close to me told me that they don’t keep their month to month bills. They look at the amount, pay the bill and throw the paperwork away. That gives me heart palpitations. What if your next bill comes and it’s wrong! What if you need to call and give the people in Whoville a piece of your mind because they overcharged you for whatzits that month?!? These are the things that can keep me up at night. I’ll keep my monthly bills for a year thank you very much.
Eventually those things go into the shred pile. Especially if it has an account number on it. I can’t imagine why someone would want my water bill with the account number, but still.
Also, I don’t throw anything away with our name and address on it. I can only imagine some crazed mail stealer waiting for me to throw away a piece of mail with our name and address on it so they can use it for nefarious purposes. Denton constantly reminds me that our name and address is listed in the local phone book. I don’t care. I’m not taking any chances. Anything with our name and address, anything with an account number, all of those things go into the shred pile.
My shred pile used to overwhelm me. I had a beautiful piece of furniture to store all of my records in, but the shred pile just sat and stared at me from across the room. Who has time to shred things all day long? Not me. So I put them into a pile to accumulate and I would shred all of them at once. Usually every couple of months. Sigh….. I decided to do something about it.
My shred pile used to sit in that beautiful tray that now houses our air purifier. And it would grow and grow and become the equivalent of Mt. Everest in papers that needed to be disposed of. So I put them into a container. Once the container is full, I need to take care of it. It is also hidden to the left of the filing cabinet. It’s still very handy to shove all of the papers into, but out of direct site lines of the general public in my house.
See? You don’t even notice my pile o’ papers, do you?
Do you have a shred pile at your house too, or do you just chunk yours in the garbage like Denton does when I’m not looking?
