Paper Survival Tip #2: Behaviors

Part of becoming organized is learning about your behaviors. It is much easier to try and work with your behaviors than against them.  There is a great book by Karen Jorgerst- If I Could Just Get Organized! Home Management Hope For Pilers and Filers. We completely agree with her thoughts on the two types of behaviors that people adopt in their lives--piling or filing.

Filers are the highly organized type. They have the neat and tidy underwear drawers, closets are color-coded, and canned goods are alphabetized. And- no that is not me! Pilers are … well,  pilers. They like nice flat surfaces perfect for wonderful, glorious piles. There is a third category that some of us fit into called messies. They are pilers attempting to be filers. They try to use systems that don’t work for their personality or behaviors. This leads to frustration and failure so they let the piles over run their lives.

I'm pretty convinced that part of the reason that pilers have little success with off the shelf organizing products is because they were developed from the brains of filers. The two have common ground but realistically a piler will drive themselves crazy trying to become a filer. Remember that whole guilt, shame thing I talked about in the first tip?

There are some great systems out there that work, just be clear that a system that works well for one person might not for another. Study your behaviors and work with them not against them. Try to find areas of your life where a system you use does work particularly well for you and see if you can adapt it to your paper handling. What works at your job, in volunteer positions, etc? Maybe your pantry or your scrapbokking space is absolutely fabulous.  Is it because you used color coding, labels, baskets, easily retrievable words. In other words steal ideas from yourself. This will help you decide if an off-the-shelf system will work for YOU or if you can simply develop your own.

Just to be clear, either an extreme filer or piler can have issues with paper even with the best of systems.  If you struggle with paper clutter, then you are probably afraid of tossing something very important and not being able to get the information back. 

There is a statistic that I firmly agree with that states that we only use 20% of the paper that comes into our lives. That means the other 80% is information that we will never access or need to access again. How many times have you worked hours diligently filing your important papers only to never look at them again and end up throwing them away a few years later?

Pilers might have horizontal piles to search through but filers may very well have a similar problem--just vertical in nature. The best determinant of a successful system is how much time you have spent from beginning to end managing your paper.

And that boils down to the next topic--

Just how do I let go of my wonderful, beautiful, luxurious paper and what exactly should I keep?