How We Eliminate Paper Clutter

Friday, March 25, 2011


I'm not an organized person by nature. Thank God I marry one. I remember the first big fight we had after we got married was over a messy desk. Chris can't function when the place is not in order while I didn't see the need to clean up when I was still working on something. I came a long way since then. Throughout the years of our marriage, I learn how to plan and organize my life, time, and resources.  The one book that I found to be very helpful is 
 Order from Chaos: A Six-Step Plan for Organizing Yourself, Your Office, and Your Life. I wrote a review/ summary about the book a little while ago here.

Anyway, last week The Simplemom Project Simplify Hot Spot#2 was Paper Clutter (junk mails, books, magazine, documents, etc...)  so I look around the house and below are the result. 

We had these two (one for Chris and one for me) Dumping Bins: filled with paper docs that need to be put away: 

I decided it's time to tackle the piles and eliminate one bin since I'm the one who handle paper filing anyway.

That's all the paper clutter that I found. We just happened to file and clean up our tax and financial documents earlier this month.  The IRS only requires us to keep tax docs for 3 years (unless the persons cheat on their income then the IRS can go back up to 7 years) - so that's what we do. However, we keep other important financial docs such as retirement, investment, and home buying stuff. Below is how we keep our tax docs:

We keep our receipts inside these clear plastic folders until I update them on Quicken every month or so:


I tackle the mails when they come in; either file or throw them away. Any bills or items that required action later goes into Pending File below


Afterward, each document goes into their appropriate folder. I learn how to organize my financial docs from this book. I wrote a blog post about this a while ago here

And below is how I organize all my recipes: inside a clear file folder. I just pull out the appropriate page whenever I need to cook/ bake something:

We have book shelves to hold most of our books but I keep my reference books close by the place where I use them. For instance: I have this little pile of recipe books, Bible, and journal in the dining room: 

I got asked often how I find time to read book. The picture below should give you the answer =)

And here is Max's pile of books down stair: 

As soon as I took the above pics, Max immediately come to me asking me to take the picture of his Thomas book as well.

That's it. Hope you find this to be helpful.

DESIGNED BY ECLAIR DESIGNS