The Best Ways to Organize Piles of Paperwork
If you do not have a system in place for managing your paperwork, piles and piles of paper will take over your entire work area at your office or at home. Rather than losing school letters and misplacing medical bills, create an organizational system that you can maintain whenever new paperwork comes in, so that you never lose another important document.
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Categorization
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Sorting through your piles of paperwork and creating categories for the documents is an effective way to stay organized. Categories for your home include utilities, mortgage, bank accounts, medical, taxes and pets, while categories for an office may be things like reports, complaints, returns, evaluations and special projects. Go through all of the paperwork that has piled up and sort them into piles based on the category that they fall under. Junk mail and other documents that you do not need can be shredded or thrown away.
Filing
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Once you have categorized your pile of paperwork, create file folders or designated slots in a paper tray to maintain the documents in the order that you put them in. Each category of paperwork should receive its own file folder or paper tray slot. The next thing to do as part of your filing is to make labels for the folders. Labeling your file folders allows you to efficiently and conveniently locate the paperwork you put away, and it makes it easy for you to know which folder to add new documents into. If you do not wish to label folders, another option is to get folders in various colors, so that you know that the medical documents are in the red folder, for instance, and the school documents are in the green one.
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Time Frame
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If you have let old paperwork pile up from years past, it is advantageous for you to organize your documents according to year. This is especially important when it comes to tax documents. As you sort through the paperwork, make piles of the documents that belong to particular years. At this time, decide which documents you still need to hold onto. It is always a good idea to keep your tax paperwork for records, but old receipts and letters might be able to be tossed. If you want to hold onto all of the paperwork from years past, create an archiving system. Archive the old documents and records by placing them in a separate storage device, such as a filing cabinet that you keep in the garage or a storage closet in the office. The oldest documents should be in the very back, with the more current years in front. The present year's paperwork should always be at the very front so that you have immediate access to the paperwork.
Maintenance
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You can avoid paperwork pile-up problems by maintaining the organization system. As soon as you get mail or more documents, open, read and file them away. Put paperwork that you will need for paying bills, for instance, in a tray for bills or for follow-up. If you keep up the flow of incoming paperwork, then you can prevent becoming drowned in documents.
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References
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