Over the last couple of days I was focusing on an area of clutter that has always been really easy for me to avoid. I’ll do anything before I dig into this task.
Cleaning the file cabinet.
As usual, the fear of starting the job vastly outweighed the pain of the actual job itself.
In fact, with a good podcast on in the background and my whole dining table to spread things out on, going through all this accumulated paperwork was a breeze.
Just to give a glimpse of where I was when I started, here’s where things were.
My papers were spread between two different places, in two different rooms. There was a filing cabinet in my office and a file box on the floor of my closet.
Now I’ve written about how I find my closet to be an easy place for me to declutter, so it may be a bit of a surprise that there was still some minimizing to do there. It’s funny how there are just certain things that escape the declutter bug.
For me it was this paperwork. And believe me, I knew it. That file bin on the floor of my otherwise pretty minimal closet was driving me nuts.
So this was a perfect Kondo-esque exercise – start by getting everything of the same category in the same place.
I brought all the paperwork down to the office where I ultimately wanted it to find a home.
Admittedly, this lived there for a couple of days, awaiting the right time to meet its demise.
Some decluttering trends emerged…
As I started to sort through it and make piles, it seemed that there were a few trends that made for easy decluttering.
1. Receipts
I don’t know why, but for years I kept receipts that I thought would be relevant to my taxes and business expenses. Of course, my credit card company does a far better job of segregating these expenses for me, presents me with a year end summary, and has an archive of retrievable statements.
Any receipts for large-ticket household items may have been filed away, but otherwise, these stacks were promptly shredded.
2. Household items and appliances
Whether it was appliances, the new air conditioner we had installed, or the water damage recovery (good times), there seemed to be a whole folder for each of these events in my files. These things tend to be quite expensive, so it’s tempting to keep all the paperwork associated with them.
However, after looking a bit closer at what was actually in these folders, there was very little that actually warranted keeping. It tended to mostly be sales literature or some form that I signed when delivered.
Of course there’s also the ubiquitous installation guide, as if I’m going to go use the schematic to troubleshoot electrical on my AC. Some people absolutely might. Not me.
This stuff is all available online these days anyway.
And then there was the folder itself. Something nice and shiny to hold all of this useless clutter.
99% of it went in the garbage. And it was easy.
At the end of the cleaning session, I was down to about half of a drawer in my minimalist filing cabinet and the empty bin was out in the garage where it will eventually get filled with other stuff heading to the donation center or garbage dump.
Not only did I do a serious declutter, going through this paperwork also helped identify some piles of stuff that were actually important. Now, instead of being lost in the piles, these items are organized and in a safe place and will be easy to find if ever required.
The next phase of this will be to go through and scan certain things that can be digitized. But for today, this was a good step and it was time to move on.