Do you struggle with stacks of mail, paperwork, and other notes around your office or house? Feel like you’re always wasting time looking for a file or a bill?
Being better organized with your paperwork can help you save money (no late fees), time (no wasted time searching), and the mental stress and anxiety that piles of paper often create. Here are a few ideas for how to create routines that manage the flow of common day-to-day paperwork.
Get on top of the paper-related “to-do” items, clear your space, and easily find what you’re looking for, when you’re looking for it.
Physical Mail
I would recommend taking care of your mail each day as it comes in, rather than letting the pile get too high.
Location: Pick a place where the new mail will go as soon as you bring it in. This might look like a basket in your kitchen, near your door, or wherever you like to take care of household administration. Near the mail, keep easy access to everything you’ll need for letter opening and responding such as a letter opener, a recycling bin, a shredder, your checkbook or computer for bill payments, envelopes and stamps, a gel pen (along with other measures, gel pens can help reduce the risk of check-washing), filing system, folders, sticky notes, a calendar, etc. If you can’t keep all of these near the mail, make it so that the mail can easily be moved to a location with these items.
Routine: Once a day, or on your desired frequency, go through all of the new mail and immediately decide what action needs to be taken.
Junk: First figure out how to best remove yourself from receiving solicitations (otherwise it will just keep reappearing!). You can set these aside and do them all at once or do them right away. Once you’ve opted out, then shred or recycle the piece immediately to get it out of the way.
Bills & Donations: Review your finances, which should now be handy digitally or physically, and take care of the payments quickly if you are able to do so. I recommend online payments when possible to save time and reduce check-washing fraud. Online payments do sometimes incur fees, however, if you don’t set up direct payment; so consider your options and review the additional costs. (Payment by mail also costs the price of the envelope plus a stamp, so if the fee to pay online is lower and the process is more secure, it might be worth your while.)
If you choose to pay by mail, write your check in a more secure type of ink and bring your mail piece directly to a post office. Mailboxes at homes and around town have a higher rate of theft. If you cannot pay the bills right away, put them in a special BILL PAY location. Consider putting post-it notes on the letters to indicate when they are due, or put the dates on your calendar and be sure to budget enough time for transit before the due date.
Editors Note: A great way to manage less mail is to receive less mail! Opt-out of solicitations from prospecting companies, only $10 for 10 years with DMA Choice (recommended by USPS) or contact companies you get mail from to ask them to remove you from future mailings. You can also reduce mail by setting up autopay for your bills and tracking them through a financial software, which also helps with financial awareness, planning, and budgeting.
Notes (in notebooks)
I often hear comments such as, "Whenever I need to take a note I just grab the nearest notebook, paper, or notepad and then my notes are all over the place - I can never find what I’m looking for."
Try to identify a system that will work for you and stick with it for a specified period. This system may look very different from someone else’s, and there is no “right” way as long as it works for you. If the system you’ve picked doesn’t fit, try tweaking it slightly and then sticking to it again to give it a chance to sink in. Reflect and adjust again as needed.
People sometimes want a different notebook for each area of life or topic, but this system tends to work best when you have one workspace that you can access all the time. You’ll want to consider what to do when you’re traveling or on the road.
Digital or Analog?
There are many different ways to address notes and notebooks. Digital tools tend to work well for some because they can be accessed from any device via the cloud. Also, many of us always often have a smartphone with us everywhere and can add to notes easily with that method. Personally, digital note-taking does not work for me, and so I use an analog system.
A Notebook to Take With You
My personal solution: I have one small notebook I carry everywhere. My choice is the Hobonichi Techo but there are so many wonderful notebook options out there. (I like this one because it is easily identifiable and can fit into most bags and even a large pocket.) The trick to this method is to have a routine or ritual around transferring the notes into a relevant system and reviewing the notes within the book on a regular basis. Some notes are just thoughts and don’t need to be transferred. Others are pending to-do items. If I haven’t crossed them off, I transfer them into a to-do log (a separate specific notebook or on my digital calendar) so that they aren’t forgotten.
Sticky Notes/Small Paper Notes
If your system is small notes on stickies or random pieces of paper, the key is a ritual around transferring these notes to other storage locations. For example, to-do items can go on a list or in your calendar system. Information to remember can be stored in a bookmark file physically or digitally. Try to do this at the end of every day before the notes have a chance to pile up. If you can’t manage every day, keep them in one place like a folder that you can easily search through and review regularly.
Meeting Notes
Because I prefer writing by hand, I use a Rocketbook and then scan these files digitally into client folders which can be easily accessed and searched. That way I don’t have to keep the physical pages. (Note, it doesn’t recognize my handwriting well for searching. There are other tools such as reMarkable that may be better at this, but I prefer the actual paper feel to a tablet.)
You can also use a free tool like Adobe Scan to scan pages into a digital filing system, which also attempts to recognize writing and make documents searchable. Once you’ve scanned the document, let go of the original. If you need to keep original files, keep them in file folders or binders instead for easy categorizing and organization. I prefer storing notes digitally because of the ease of searching for information, storing without the bulk of paper, and accessibility from any location.
Be consistent about a naming convention for your digital files and put key information in the document title to make it easily searchable. Then organize into relevant folders. For example:
2024 01 06 Board Meeting - 2024 Organization Goal Setting - Annual Plan
Client - John Smith - 01_06_2024 - Strategy Planning Session
2024 - Book Reading Notes - The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Biology 101 - SY 23-24 - Notes - Mitochondria
Files
For pending paperwork that needs to be tended to, I recommend choosing one place where these pages or files go. Maybe a rack, a basket, or a pile if that's what you prefer. Schedule a regular date with yourself to review this pile and then plan it into your schedule to take care of each specific task.
Maybe you need to get your passport renewed (like me). This week you might schedule an hour to print and fill out the paperwork. Next week, you put on your calendar when and where to get the photos taken. When that's complete you can schedule a time to package the renewal and take it to the post office. Other items in your pile may have fewer or more steps.
For my paperwork, I have a magazine file box and I clip each item to its own folder. Any related paperwork can be added. This helps keep everything in one place but allows me to roughly see how many items are pending and easily sort through them weekly. I recommend setting up digital reminders for items that have deadlines so you can be pinged on a specific frequency.
Once you've completed the steps necessary to be done with the paperwork, you can discard or file it accordingly. For a paper filing system, I love a good old filing cabinet. I recommend digitally scanning and filing anything that doesn’t need to be kept physically, with a reliable filing and naming system. Recycle or shred whatever you can.
Schedule Reviews
As you’ve seen sprinkled throughout above, I recommend scheduling weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews for different kinds of paperwork. I also suggest going through your filing cabinet at least once a year because sometimes we only need to hold onto documents for a short period and can eventually let them go.
Manuals
Have a specific location or file for all of your manuals. Review annually in case you've replaced any of the appliances and can now recycle the manual. (Some Professional Organizers will suggest that you don't need to keep these manuals at all, as many of them can be found online, but I prefer to have these handy as sometimes old appliance manuals are hard to find.)
Is there another type of paper item that you struggle with? Have another paper organizing idea you've tried and liked? Let us know in the comments below.
