Paper
File Cabinets Get Full
When’s the last time you went through every file in your file cabinet and purged what you no longer need? I was motivated to do so recently because I wanted to update my Afterlife file.
As you may recall, I set up an Afterlife file several years ago so that my loved ones would have the information they needed if I became incapacitated or died. You can see more about that process in my post Planning Your Afterlife.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to update the information in my Afterlife file. Included in that file are where the important documents can be found in our file cabinet. While updating the list of important documents, I decided to review EVERY folder. That led to a purge that I worked on sporadically until mid-February!
It also led to my handing over to my adult daughter many files that related to her upbringing and young adulthood. We sat down together and went through the files and she took home only what she considered important (or highly nostalgic). The rest went into the shredder.
My file cabinet is so spacious now that it’s a pleasure to file or retrieve something. Some of the easy wins were papers that I have not looked at since I filed them away, or papers that have been superseded by other papers.
When prospective clients call me because they need help organizing paper, I always ask them if they have a file cabinet. The usual answer is “Yes, but it’s full”. The file cabinet in your home should not be just a historical vault. It’s hard to get a handle on managing your current paperwork if there’s no place where you can reliably store it.
So if it has been a while since you reviewed the contents of your file cabinet, dig in. Do only a few files at at time so that it doesn’t require a huge time commitment. You’ll be glad that you did.
My dog Brandy enjoyed keeping my papers warm while I purged!
Why I’m Changing My Calendar System
I have been a devoted Franklin Planner user since 1991. I discovered the Franklin Planner when I was still in Corporate America. I admired a colleague’s desk calendar and she told me that it was made by Franklin and that if you take their one-day time management class, you get the planner for free. I was intrigued and signed up for the class. It changed my life.
I have always been a list-maker, but one of the most important things I learned at that one-day class was that you shouldn’t have multiple to-do lists. You should have only one to-do list and it should be prioritized daily. This is a principle that I have followed for over 30 years and that I teach my clients about time management.
The Franklin Planner comes in a looseleaf binder. It has a two-page spread per month, followed by a two-page spread per day with a daily to-do list on the left and a space for taking notes on the right. Another important principle that I learned at the class was: eliminate floating paper from your life. Everything that you write down during the day should go onto this notes page. If you’ve ever hunted frantically for the napkin or back of an envelope on which you scribbled a phone number or an important piece of information, you understand the wisdom of this principle.
The Franklin Planner I received at the class in 1991 was in the size known as Classic, which is 5.5 inches wide and 8.5 inches high. I found it a bit too large for shlepping on public transportation, and over the years I have switched to smaller versions a couple of times. I’m down to the smallest size they make: the Pocket size, which is 3.5″ x 6″ and is pictured below.
So why am I changing my calendar system after 34+ years? It’s because we no longer live in a paper-based society, and I’m dedicating space to carry my iPhone instead. I can stick my iPhone in my coat pocket or, if I’m not wearing a coat, in my small handbag. However, the planner’s bulk requires that I carry a separate bag for it.
I take many fewer handwritten notes than I used to. Mainly, the information I want to reference is in electronic files. Even if I take notes in my planner, if it’s important it gets transferred to my computer. I especially like to add information to Evernote, as it is accessible from any of my devices – computer, iPhone, iPad – and can be viewed when I’m out of the house.
For most of this year, I’ve been photographing the calendar pages in my planner so that I can refer to them when I am making a client appointment. Then I e-mail myself the details of the appointment for entry in my paper calendar when I get home. It’s not an ideal system and I knew I needed to come up with something better.
Most of my clients use electronic calendars, but I like to look at an entire month at a time. I add appointments to my electronic calendar if I need to record details that don’t fit into the little square on my paper calendar, such as Zoom info or a physical address. Otherwise, looking at the full month at once gives me better control over my time management.
So what are the two things I wanted to carry forth into my new calendar system? A monthly calendar and a daily to-do list. Franklin was not offering any products that would give me those two features, so I’ve defected. I purchased a Day-Timer 2-page per month wire-bound pocket calendar. It’s very slim and light and will slip easily into my handbag on those days when I need to carry a calendar. Between each monthly two-page spread, there is a blank page that will enable me to take any notes.
What about the to-do list? Day-Timer sells a sticky note to-do list that’s about the same size as the calendar. I can use it separately from the calendar, or peel off today’s list and attach it to the calendar if I want to take it with me.
It’s a little scary to be shifting systems after 34+ years, but I’m excited about keeping my favorite habits and jettisoning the rest.
Would You Keep This If You Were Moving?
I think it’s pretty clear that we will keep accumulating stuff until we run out of room. Sometimes we continue even after we’ve run out of room. (That’s usually when people contact a Professional Organizer.)
If you’re someone, like me, who has an abundance of of storage space in your home, then it may take a while before you run out of space. So I’ve developed a question that helps me identify things I should let go of even if I have the space to keep them: “Would I keep this if I were moving?”
Relocating is a great opportunity to revisit everything you own and decide if it has a place in your future life. Unfortunately, many people panic prior to moving and don’t leave themselves enough time to do that. They think they will make those decisions when they are unpacking. But getting resettled into a new home is even more stressful than preparing to vacate your old home, so those decisions don’t get made.
I’m in a quasi-relocating situation right now. I’m about to do some upgrades to my home. This will require us to start living in our second bedroom while work is being done to our bedroom and en suite bath. We haven’t moved in yet, but I’ve been making preparations. I’ve already moved a couple of bookcases from our bedroom to the second bedroom since they will just be in the way of the renovation. This required us to take everything off those shelves, which meant giving them a thorough review. A lot of books got donated — and a lot of magazines and sheet music got recycled — as a result of that exercise.
I will also have to temporarily move out of my bathroom and start sharing my husband’s bathroom. So I’m giving everything in my bathroom the once over. All of the items that I have been keeping “just in case” are getting tossed. I plan to move my daily toiletries and makeup into his bathroom, as well as useful sundries like Band Aids and cold medicine. Everything else will go into boxes. My goal is to minimize what gets stored in a box — just the backup items like extra tubes of toothpaste, since I know I will use those in time.
I will be doing some kitchen upgrades as well and I will have to shift things around in my cabinets to make that work. I plan to revisit everything in my kitchen and ask myself what I am likely to use in the future. I streamlined my cabinets quite a bit already, as I’ve written about in Tricking Out My Kitchen and Changing It Up. But there is always more to get rid of!
Don’t wait until you are relocating to give your stuff the once over. Living with less is much more relaxing than living with too much.
Cards That Matter
I am continually helping clients grapple with the greeting cards they have received and collected. While I have alluded to the issue in my posts over the years, my last post dedicated specifically to greeting cards was in 2012. I have just reread it, and I still agree with my advice. Give it a read here: Our Love-Hate Relationship with Greeting Cards.
In that post, I mentioned that my mother had passed away earlier that year and that I had saved all the sympathy cards people sent me. I wrote, “I treasured each personal message. Missives that reach us when we are at our most vulnerable take on a special significance. At some point in the future, I may decide to throw them away. How you react in a similar situation will depend on you.”
Eleven years later, I still have those cards. I also still have the cards that I received after my father’s passing three years later. Earlier this year, when my little dog Alfie passed away, I received quite a few sympathy cards. I was very touched that so many people reached out to acknowledge my loss. Of course I have saved those as well.
As I usually do when I get greeting cards (for holidays, birthdays, anniversaries), I displayed the cards on top of my piano. While I did quite a bit of clearing things out after Alfie’s passing in February (see Changing It Up), the cards stayed up for a while. When I finally cleared them off and got ready to put them in my memorabilia box, I was thinking about how to keep them all together. Should I use a ribbon? A rubber band? An envelope? Then my eye fell on Alfie’s bow tie.
Each time we took Alfie to the groomer, he would be sent home wearing something decorative, such as a bandana or bow tie. Often it was themed to the time of year, such as a red, white, and blue bandana in July or a Christmas-patterned bandana in December. I got into the habit of displaying the accessory around the piano lamp for a few weeks and then donating it. Alfie’s last grooming was two weeks before he died, and he came home wearing a red sparkling bow tie, presumably in honor of Valentine’s Day which was a few days later.
I decided that Alfie’s last bow tie was the perfect way to hold together the sympathy cards I had received to commemorate his passing. It was adjustable, so I was able to make it fit perfectly.
In that 2012 post about greeting cards, I concluded by saying, “It’s all about keeping what is important to you, and recycling or tossing the rest. Don’t keep anything out of guilt. Keep it because it’s something you can’t bear to part with.”
Organizing Memorabilia
For several months, I have been working with a client who had moved into a new apartment and wanted to ensure that it was set up in an organized and maintainable fashion. As we unpacked boxes and put things away, we set aside two categories of items that I knew would be time-consuming to tackle: photos and memorabilia.
When we were done with every room and every storage area in the apartment, it was time to tackle the photos and memorabilia. I suggested we start with the memorabilia.
My client describes herself as a sentimentalist. She was also quick to point out that we would be organizing memorabilia from three homes: her adult apartment, her childhood home, and her mother’s apartment. Her mother passed away recently and that memorabilia had ended up mixed in with my client’s stuff. So what to do with a lifetime’s worth of memorabilia and then some?
The answer is: divide and conquer. The sheer volume of memorabilia was overwhelming, but breaking it down into smaller groups would be the key to making it manageable.
We started by going through each piece of paper and deciding what broad category it belonged to. Was it related to my client’s parents, to her childhood, to her work life, to her adult years? Was it a card she had received at some point ?
We spent several sessions going through the unsorted papers, always with a garbage bag nearby. For every piece of paper that she saved, another one went in the trash. As we performed this exercise, I recalled the words of Australian organizer Peter Walsh, who said, “If everything is important, then nothing is important.”
Once we had touched every single piece of paper and sorted it into a category, we focused on each category and reviewed every paper again. I sorted things into subcategories to ensure that there were no duplicates. We eventually ended up with a core set of papers that my client considered special.
Now it was time to figure out how to contain everything. I measured the size and shape of each pile and later e-mailed my client with some suggested purchases. She ended up buying four boxes of different sizes and colors made by Bigso, ordered via Amazon.
The picture below shows what the end result was. We settled on these four names for her categories: My Cards, Professional, Mom & Dad, and Memorabilia. (The last category encompasses everything that didn’t fit into one of those other categories). I used my labeler to label the boxes, and then we found a shelf in her closet where they all fit and which is easy for her to access without a stepladder. That means she can continue to add things to the boxes as her life goes on.
She was thrilled with how things turned out, and I was thrilled for her. Now we are turning our attention to the photographs, which is even more challenging than the memorabilia. But we are forging on, with the vision of orderly, labeled photo boxes dancing in our future.
