Saturday, September 25, 2010

My brilliant new filing system

For years, I've been trying to maintain a filing system where bills and receipts and important documents are sorted into different folders depending on their purpose. It's never worked, because I've always been like "OMG, it's too much work to find the right folder!" (#FirstWorldProblems) and just stuck the document in the front of the drawer to deal with later.

So here's my new system: one folder for each year. Every time I get a new piece of paper I need to keep, I put it in the front of the folder. That's all. So everything's in one folder, but it's basically in chronological order and shouldn't be too difficult to find if I ever need to find it (which I never actually have).

I currently have 7 years of stuff filed, so at the end of the year I just have to grab the oldest folder and shred everything in it, rather than going through every folder or letting stuff I don't need to keep languish and take up space.

I wish I'd thought of this earlier! I really need to learn to embrace my weaknesses more often.

1 comment:

laura k said...

Hmm, this is interesting. As an obsessive filer, I will have to consider this.

I wonder why you never have to find any of these papers. I often do.