This seemed even more of a waste, so I decided to let a lot of them go." In the end, she decided to keep only a carefully selected 15 in her office. "But I began to feel like I was just doing it out of a sense of duty. "To leave them unread seemed such a waste that I decided to speed-read to get through them," she said. Most of the books that she had managed to read were her most recent purchases.
When we met again, however, I wasn't surprised to hear that she had given up partway through. "I'll read as many as I can during my next vacation," she declared. When we counted them, there were over 50, and more than half had been sitting on the shelf for two years or more. One of my clients had a bookcase in her office filled with unread books. In reality, however, we often keep books at work for the wrong reasons. Reading them can boost our motivation, and just displaying them can add a personal touch to our space. When kept at our desks or on our bookshelves, they can give us inspiration or a sense of security. What would you do? Which ones would you scramble to save from the shredder?Ī best-seller you hoped to read someday, a how-to book about accounting you bought to improve your skills, a book received from a client…what kinds of books do you have in your work space?īooks are filled with valuable knowledge that can help us do our jobs. In my tidying lessons, when a client has trouble deciding which papers to keep and which to discard, I fire off questions about each one-things like "When do you need this?," "How long have you had it?," "How often do you go back and look at it?," "Can you find the same content on the internet?," "Have you already saved it on your computer?," "How much of a problem would it be if you didn't have this?," and "Does it really spark joy?" If you balk at the premise that you should discard them all, try imagining that I have just walked into your office and announced that I'm going to shred all your papers. But because rebound is a common problem when people hang on to things "just because," keep in mind that the basic rule for papers is to discard them all.
These might include documents you want to keep as a reference or ones that actually spark joy for you. The last category is papers you want to save for other reasons. In this case, rather than scanning them as you sort, it's more efficient to put them in a "to-be-scanned-later" pile and do the scanning all in one go. If you don't need to keep the originals, you can scan them and store them electronically. Sort them by category and file them in a cabinet or in folders on a shelf. Next, let's look at papers we're required to save. That way they won't become jumbled up with papers in other categories. I recommend storing all of them in one upright filing box until you've dealt with them. The pending category includes papers that need some kind of action, such as outstanding bills.
How to Eliminate Paper Clutter in Just 5 Minutes a Day
Papers can be broadly divided into three categories: pending, save because you have to, and save because you want to. This makes filing them when you're done quicker and easier. It can be helpful to sort papers into categories while you are skimming through the content.
Even papers that are in envelopes should be taken out and checked page by page in case advertising leaflets or other unwanted material is mixed in with them. Start by gathering all your papers together in one spot and looking at each one. The more papers we accumulate, the more time it takes to find particular documents, and the harder they are to put in order. Sheets of paper seem so slim we often hang on to them without really thinking. I'm just trying to get across how much resolve we need in order to choose only those that are absolutely necessary and to discard the rest. Of course, I don't mean that we should eliminate papers entirely. My clients always look dumbfounded when I say this. The general rule for papers is to discard everything.