Let’s face it. Not many people get excited about the prospect of sorting through mountains of papers on their desk / workstation.These piles are easy to accumulate and over time can become quite overwhelming.As with most organizing projects, this does not need to happen all at once. I like to start slow and go from there. For your first session, put aside about half an hour. See how that goes. If you are feeling overwhelmed at the end, then plan a 15-minute session. I know this sounds like “at this rate I will never finish” but this is just to get going. You will most likely find that you can go for longer time periods as you make progress. The key is not to think about the overall project but to focus on your task at hand.
Before you start, there are a couple of things to think about. For the documents you will be keeping, where will you house them? Do you have a filing system in place or will they go into a file box? For the documents you no longer need, do they need to be shredded or can they just be recycled? Have two boxes on hand, one for documents you are keeping and one for anything to be discarded.
You can either file as you go, or just put all documents in a TO KEEP box and file afterwards. Whatever gives you the best momentum works.There is no set way of doing this. I find it a little more satisfying just sorting through everything first, then do the filing afterwards. This way, you can get rid of the disposable papers and all of the papers to file are together so it seems less daunting. This also allows you to keep up the momentum.
For those of you with scanning capabilities, keep in mind that your papers can be digitized, as well, which would eliminate having tostore them in boxes, etc.
