How to Organize your Vital Paperwork

Video Transcript

"I want to show you how to organize your paperwork. A lot of times people end up with a lot of paper on their desktop, on their dining table and they have no idea where to start. I'm going to walk you through the little steps to get your paperwork organized. First you want to clear your paperwork from your desktop service or wherever you want to get organized. You will gather all you paperwork and put them in a sizable container and you are going to carry your paperwork to an area of the house where there is a large enough space where you can actually sort through your papers. What I'm using now is an empty table space of the dining room to do the sorting of the paper. And what you are going to do is take a little stack from your box of papers, a stack that can be easily handled by your hand. You are just going to quickly go through each piece of paper and if it's something you can make a decision to throw away right away, then just toss it out into a trash bin that you want to put near you through this process. And then if you see something that you want then you want to make a decision about what kind of category it is. For example, the piece of paper I am looking at right now is an insurance policy. So I know that this has something to do with insurance, so let me go ahead and make a category for it. Because the reason, how I'm doing this is I'm making up categories as I go because I don't know the categories of papers I have just by seeing them piled. So I'm going to put insurance down there. There might be some categories of paper that you know for sure that you have. For example, you know you have for sure have bills, so these are the categories you can go ahead and create. And what I like to do is put the categories on little pieces of stickies. I get the sort of stronger stickies; I get stickies with the stronger back so they don't get moved away easily. I just put them on the desktop service. And then I put the paper of the category that I wrote on the sticky right next to it. That's how I'm doing the sorting. So you would do the same process for all of your different paperwork until you have all the pile from the box neatly sorted into the categories. After you do that, you want to put the paper into temporary folders. For example, everything that has to do with insurance that I have gathered will go into the insurance folder and then I will put the sticky on top of the temporary folder. And just a reminder, you want to get stickies that really stick, the stronger hold type because you want to make sure you don't loose the little paper. So I will do that with all the paperwork that I have sorted. And after that I have neat little stack that I can actually take back to my home office or where these paper come from and then I can easily find a new home for these paperwork without the sorted paper getting tangled up again."