Does paper clutter stress you out as it threatens to take over your counters, your desks, and any other flat surface? Take a deep breath and let me simplify the process of organizing all your paper clutter.
Spring cleaning is in full swing and tax season is over… which means it’s a great time to tackle those piles and files of paper throughout your home.
Over the years, I’ve written dozens of posts about paper organization… so I thought I’d try to summarize many of my paper organizing posts I’ve already written in attempts to create an “at-a-glance” reference for most of your paper organizing needs.
If you’re on a mission to get your paperwork organized, this post is a must-read!
Tax Documents
Since today is Tax Day, I figured I’d start by sharing my SUPER SIMPLE method of organizing our tax documents.
Essentially, I use 2 manilla file folders each year (one for personal taxes, one for my business taxes). I keep these 2 files at the front of our filing cabinet and any time I get any sort of tax-related document, it goes directly into those files.
When it’s time to file our taxes, I simply verify that all the necessary information is in those 2 files, and drop them off at our accountant. Once I get our taxes back, I change the year on the file folders and re-use them for the next year.
Related Reading: How I organize my tax documents in minutes.
This organizational method has worked marvelously for both our personal taxes and my business taxes — and usually only requires 15 minutes of my time mid-February when I quickly organize the contents of the folder for our accountant.
I rarely ever forget or misplace important tax documents, which our accountants appreciate!
General Paperwork
There are hundreds of books and thousands of blog posts on how to organize paper clutter — so there’s no way I can sum up everything in one little paragraph. Instead, I’ll share 3 tips that will likely work for almost any paper items in your home.
1.When in doubt, toss it out. Seriously, in our current digital world, there is likely always a digital copy of your document somewhere. You don’t need that grocery receipt, that electric bill, or that proof of payment for your credit card.
2. Make it really convenient to put your paperwork away. If you sort your mail and paperwork in the kitchen, considering getting a small filing cabinet or a wall organizer for your kitchen (otherwise you’ll just start piling the papers on the counters!)
If you do most of your paperwork in the office (like us) put the filing cabinet in the office.
You must create a “home” for the paper you plan to keep… and things will stay a lot neater if that home is in a convenient location.
Related Reading: How we set up our filing cabinet.
3. Don’t stress about doing it “right”. There really isn’t one “right way” to organize your paperwork. Yes, some of my ideas might work wonderfully for you — feel free to use them. Others might not work as well — that’s ok too!
Your system must work for you, your family, your lifestyle, your paper needs, etc. And it’s OK if you don’t find the perfect system right away — just play around with it until something clicks.
Important Paperwork
At the end of 2013, I was nearing the due date of my second baby, and I decided it was finally time to get really serious about organizing all our important documents and paperwork “just in case” something ever happened to Dave or to me (or to both of us).
I wanted to make it VERY easy for any of our family members to log into our online accounts, contact the right people to get access to our bank accounts, know where our money was and how to access it in the event of an emergency, etc. etc.
So… I created a “Family Emergency Binder” where I compiled ALL our family’s important information into one easy-to-access binder.
I originally put this binder together thinking it would be helpful for OTHERS who might need to step in and run our finances for a bit in the event of an emergency, but I never realized how extremely helpful it would be for ME on a regular basis.
There have been so many times over the past few years when I’ve needed a piece of information and knew exactly where to find it. In a matter of seconds I can quickly flip through our binder and get the information I need!
Since I’m the one who handles all the financial stuff in our house, I have the immense peace of mind knowing that if something ever happened to me, Dave (or another family member) would be able to fairly easily pick up where I left off and have all the information they needed at their fingertips.
Related Reading: See how we set up our Emergency Binder
Photos
I got started with digitgal photo books very early on in our marriage, and have made books for each child and for our family every year. I also went back and digitized all Dave and my childhood photos and made books of those photos too.
You know how I did it? One photo, one page, one book at a time!
Related Reading: How I create our digital photo books.
None of my books are perfect, they almost all have typos and sometimes the photos aren’t great quality (or I put 2 of the same photos on one page!) but they are DONE and printed so our kids and family and friends can actually enjoy them.
More Photo Book Posts:
- How I originally organized all our paper photos when I was preparing to digitize everything
- How I organize our digital photos with Flickr
- How I first started creating digital photo albums
- How I use templates to greatly reduce the time I spend working on my digital photo albums
- Random questions and answers regarding our digital photo albums
One more thing… if you’d love to digitize your photos but just don’t have the time, energy, or computer knowledge to do it, you might consider using LegacyBox. We used this service to digitize and preserve my parents and Dave’s parents old photos and VHS tapes and were very impressed with their services.
More paper posts:
Click on the links below for more practical tips to organize these various forms of paper (or e-paper) clutter.
- Gift cards
- Cookbooks and recipes
- Kid’s craft papers and supplies
- Kid’s artwork
- Gift wrapping supplies
- Memorabilia
- Our Addresses
- Coupons (I don’t use many coupons anymore, but if you do, this system works really well)
- Email clutter
- E-statements, E-receipts, and other online paperwork
- Usernames and Passwords (free downloadable form)
- Medical and insurance paperwork
Tools We Use:
In general, we don’t use many tools to help us organize our paper… but here are a few that have been helpful.
- Small filing cabinet (we found ours for $10 on Craigslist and I gave it a little makeover!)
- Manilla file folders (I always get the left-tab folders, not the triple-tabbed, because it’s easier to find what you need when all the labels are on one side)
- Hanging file folders (make sure you get the correct size for your filing cabinet — letter size or legal size!)
- Portable hard drive (ours is specifically for Mac computers, but you can easily find similar styles for whatever computer you have)
- Duo Binder (for our important paperwork and for craft projects — we have 4 or 5 of these floating around!)
- Small paper shredder (I don’t shred a ton, but it is nice to have one available)
One Last Thought…
I know how great it feels to finally sort through all those piles of papers and come up with a workable organizational system. Everything looks so clean and clutter-free, all your papers are either digitized or neatly organized and “in their place”, and you’re feeling pretty good about everything you accomplished (and rightfully so!)
But then you get the mail, your kids come home with all sorts of paperwork, your newspaper is piled up on top of that, you empty out your wallet with various receipts, you find a special coupon you’ve been looking for, and your spouse comes home with a pile of papers that they will “get to eventually”.
All of a sudden, you’re buried under paperwork again… and wasn’t it just clean and organized 10 minutes ago?
I’ve said it before and I’ll continue to say it over and over and over again…
Maintenance is CRUCIAL!
As with all things, your perfectly organized system WILL get ruined and messed up if you actually continue living your life.
Although I certainly don’t want you to spend every waking moment obsessing about every little piece of paper that comes into your home, you will need to develop some sort of regular maintenance plan to prevent paper from piling up all over again.
This might be spending a few minutes every night (or for sure every week) sorting through the mail, recycling the day-old newspaper, entering important dates into your calendar (and then tossing the paperwork), dealing with your kids school papers, etc. etc.
It will probably also mean doing a mini purge every 6-12 months to stay on top of things.
Even after years of diligently dealing with our papers on a daily and weekly basis, I still do an annual purge every year when I get my tax return back from our accountant. At this point, it only takes me about 15 minutes to weed through our filing cabinet, but I’m always amazed at how many papers I purge each year!
Don’t get discouraged — just keep plugin’ away!
Do you have any other paper organizing tips?
Jen says
This is perfect! I am once again licking this paper monster. I will read it a bit later when I am done with the day’s chores. Thanks for your continuing work of blogging.
Andrea says
paper is one of those things that is never truly finished. I tackle it at various points throughout the year so I’m always relatively on-top of it… but if I “skip” it for a while, it gets crazy again! Good luck with your paper monster!
PW says
We were audited by the IRS a few years ago and they would not accept any digital copies which meant we had to go to the banks to get original copies from them, some banks had closed or been taken over and the IRS forced us to go back to the original (closed) bank to get their original papers, just want to do a heads up on this. Therefore we still keep original statements after this issue. Also bought a condo and tore out the entire kitchen, floors through out etc. and have a massive amount of paper files on this which when done will be scanned and kept on the computer. I do recommend keeping this information, as we had multiple contractors, subcontractors, insurance certs etc. Any worker can come back on a claims made basis and come after homeowners for back injuries, etc. several years after the job is completed. Best to have the insurance certs available. I am in insurance, my husband an attorney, and we will be keeping paper files for some things, digital copies for others. Digital copies can be manipulated is why the IRS said they won’t accept them. I would refer to my accountant’s guidelines. Our basement flooded, which was where we have our files, we lost the bottom drawer of papers which is exactly what the IRS was looking for. We had everything scanned but they would not accept it. Bad timing with the water damage, bad timing for an audit.
Alicia says
Andrea, you are amazingly inspiring. Organizing is not my strong suit (hence, major reason why I read your blog). I could seriously use a day with you at my house to help me go through all my stuff. 🙂
Andrea says
Thanks Alicia 🙂
Paper is actually one of my favorite things to organize (so I’m sure I’ll never go fully “digital”)! I’d love to sit down with you for a whole afternoon of uninterrupted paper organization — but I doubt that will be happening any time soon (unless my children stop needing me every 5 minutes!)
Jody says
I made my first “Important Files” binder last spring, after reading one of your older posts. We moved this summer and it was so much easier to update addresses on documents using what I already put together. We keep it in a fireproof box and have a back up saved in the event of a problem. I like knowing everything is in one place! Thanks for all your tips!
Andrea says
yay! glad it is working well for you. I was also amazed by how much I use my binder on a regular basis!
Erica says
I like using binders too – I have one for my last 5 years’ worth of tax returns, plus I want to put together one for recipes that I’ve printed off the Internet or gotten out of magazines. You’ve provided some great ideas for other ways to use them though, thanks!
Avia says
I run into trouble with ongoing projects. For example we have a couple home improvement projects that we have been getting ready for and have been accumulating inspiration pictures, quotes etc. That paperwork always ends up in a big pile on my buffet because I want to have it out and accessible. Is that where you’d use the duo binder? When we did a kitchen remodel a few years ago I had a three ring binder but that seems excessive for all house projects.
Andrea says
I really don’t keep many papers like that anymore — but when I did, I always put them in a binder and just kept them in a kitchen cabinet or drawer so they weren’t sitting out all the time. You can always just pitch the binder when the project is over.
Jennifer says
My file organization tip is this – keep the tools you use SIMPLE and FLEXIBLE. I see a lot of gorgeously organized binders and file cabinets with files that are color coded, decorated with washi tape, and have fancy schemes of headings and sub-headings. For me personally, when I tried this, my organization suffered because I got so obsessive over everything being perfectly beautiful.
E.g. I needed to make a new file, but had run out of the right color folders. So I had to either mess up my color coding, or set the papers aside for later…and we know what happens then!
And for me at least, categories and subcategories didn’t work either. Do medical expenses go under ‘medical’ or ‘taxes’? That moment of wondering just made me put off doing paperwork. I guess I’m too much of a perfectionist!
Now I use plain manila folders with white labels that I can stick over the tabs. I can reuse old folders over and over because they’re all the same. I hand write the labels. I don’t even have a system of categories; every folder is logically labeled with the name of the bank, or with ‘Car-Ford’, or categories like Birth Certificates, and they are all alphabetical in a single sequence. This has worked great!
Andrea says
YES! I don’t do any color coding or fancy labels. I just use white stickers to cover old labels and permanent markers to write out the names. That’s also why I only use folder with tabs on the left side — because otherwise adding a folder would mess up the whole left-center-right system 🙂
Oh, and I have almost zero perfectionistic tendencies… but I do know that paper organization is especially difficult for anyone who does have perfectionistic tendencies.
Christine @ The (mostly) Simple Life says
I’m glad that you stress maintaining your system. Getting organized isn’t all that hard when you find what works for your family, but I think everyone wants a magical solution that will keep it perfect forever. The “magical solution” is keeping up with it and taking care of your papers each week. I’ve gotten a bit behind and it’s a lot more work to catch up than to keep up with it. Time to go file things!
Andrea says
yes, I think maintenance is key in almost every area of life (especially papers!)
Organize 365 says
Good Morning Andrea!
As usual I logged in to read your post first thing this morning and was surprised to see your mention of the Sunday Basket post you wrote in January.
You know how much I LOVE paper! Thanks for sharing my passion with your readers.
I can believe you get your taxes ready in 15 minutes! I know that has to do with the fact that you have automated and digitized all your expenses and receipts – a goal of mine this year!
Happy tax day!
🙂
Lisa
Andrea says
yes Happy Tax Day 🙂
You know I couldn’t write a post about paper organizing without linking to the paper organizing guru!