How to organise paperwork
Learning how to organise paperwork, is most likely the next step after having your desk and home office space set up. It is a good idea to start with actual physical papers before you move to the electronic stuff. This is as you can spend hours in cyberspace without anything to show for it. And you need to work on your organised paperwork plan before you should start moving many files across.
I’ll be honest this is not for the faint-hearted. And I would suggest you first declutter and organise your living room. Before you learn how to organise your life admin. Make sure you have a couple of days either in a row. Or spread it out over the next couple of weekends. During the days that you learn how to organise paperwork, make sure you have your lunch or dinner plans sorted.
Why all these instructions? Well learning how to organise paperwork is a worthwhile endeavour but it isn’t the easiest project. You will get many amazing rewards from doing this. But it won’t feel and look the same as tidying your living room. Once you have organised your paperwork, you will get many unexpected benefits. You will get reinforcement throughout the year after this project, that you have spent your time wisely. Overall you will be able to find information quickly, and easily. Saving time and frustration, confirming the idea that you are indeed an organised person.
So without further ado let’s get started.
How to organise paperwork – the start
Setting up a desk is pretty easy. Paperwork is different. There might be a whole mountain of papers and you are naturally not sure how or where to start.
Once you have your physical set up with your desk done. You most likely have piles of paper to sort.
The next step is having some desk or floor space to spread out all papers and sort them into categories. The easiest way I found is to get a pen and some post-it notes. Then start with a pile of papers (preferably not the most intimidating pile). Put each piece of paper in a category that makes sense to you. This category should be clearly written on a post-it note.
If done well, you will have post-its and small piles of papers all over the floor. This looks messy but is actually a really important step.
Declutter paperwork
You simply, need to pull everything apart. Check if it is still relevant and where it belongs before you can put it back in an organised fashion.
This is also a great time to throw out or shred papers that are not relevant anymore. You clean and declutter as you go only keeping relevant/important papers.
If you need to shred lots of papers. Lookout for an organisation in your neighbourhood that can do this for you. In my local area, we have flagstaff. They offer to shred a box of papers for $8,- this could be worthwhile especially if your papers are confidential.
“Can I remove some non-essential papers?”
One thing to remember is that although a piece of paper might have been incredibly important at one point in time. A lot of records lose their relevance very quickly. For example, several months after you had an operation. You have recovered and are now fully healed (plus claimed all there is to claim from your insurance). This is a sign that a lot of these documents can go.
Invest in a filing system
“Having a home filing system is one of the great investments you can make in terms of getting and staying organised.”
It will help you, your family, and most likely your finances a lot now and in the future.
Folders or files?
Firstly, you’ll need to figure out the tools you will need. Do you need folders or files?
Think about what Glenda Sladen calls a "chucker" or a "tucker". I love this concept. It relates to whether your style of organising; is quick throw it in a file (chucker). Or if you don’t mind tucking things nicely in folders (tucker).
Files are for the "Chucker"
Folders are for the "Tucker"
Being aware of your style means you can invest in a system that consists of open files or folders. If you use open files, you probably want a file drawer. Is one drawer enough or do you need three? How many hanging file folders do you need? If you want to use folders you need a bookshelf. How will you store heavy items and how many folders will you need (always buy a few more).
There is no right or wrong, but whatever you do – do not mix two organising systems!
Don’t have a combination of folders and files as this will do even the most organised person’s head in.
If you have a system that is easy to follow and maintain it will stay organised. Overall, keep the setup simple and expand based on your needs.
What most home filing systems require
Our lives and needs are very different and this should be reflected in your home filing system. Having said this, there are a number of categories that are the same for pretty much every household these are:
Health
Work
Important documents (like; birth and marriage certificates)
Finance (although most of this is online these days)
Tax
Education
Paper-based before electronic
Clearly, we have more documents in electronic format these days and why not? It is easy, we often need to send these documents through electronically and it is great to have a backup. However, last time I checked we still did not live in a paperless society. Meaning that; birth, marriage, and divorce certificates still came paper-based - as do, passports, any official qualifications, and health records. These documents need to be kept together in a save reliable space. I suggest this space to be your home filing system.
If you start paper-based it is also easy to mimic this system in electronic format, folder, groupings, and then file. These are called mother and child files which I’ll explain soon.
How to organise paperwork – “Mother” and “child” categories
Let’s dive a bit deeper now. If you follow the rough categories as mentioned above. You will need to start what I refer to as “Mother files” and “Child files”.
For example; you have a mother file called Health. Within this, you simply put your health records from the past to the present. Making sure the oldest pages are at the back and your most recent files are placed in the front. This is magic as you are making the files automatically organise itself chronologically.
If you have more than one family member. You simply get some manila folders with each family member's name on it. This becomes a “Child” category of the main Health File. You then still store all related health records chronologically. The added benefit of this is that when you go to the doctor with for example your eldest child. You only need to pick up their folder. In an instant, you have any related files, in one simple to-carry package.
“Mother” and “child” folders diagram
The above diagram shows the principle of “Mother” and “Child” categories.
One of the basic principles of organising is finding “a home”. Aka resting place, for each and every item in your house.
This is no different with paperwork but somehow tends to be a bit harder for our brains to grasp.
Using “Mother” and “Child” categories when organising paperwork helps with this.
This process can be either really fun finding groups of papers that relate to each other. Or you are slowly “losing the will to live”. If you find this challenging ask an organised friend over, have a cuppa, and associate this process with something positive. Your efforts now will be worth it in the long term.
How to file everything including bulky items
At this point in time, you might be going along nicely with organising your paperwork. But then we end up with those bulky items. Even in the most basic home filing system, you will have bulky items. For example, the finance stuff of your car, the purchase of your house or rental agreement (with additional keys). How can you store all of this stuff?
Folders and files are not high-capacity storage solutions. They deal with a small to medium selection of relevant documentation mainly A4 papers.
For home or car manuals with extra keys keeping them in files or folders is not an option. Not to mention their size doesn’t normally be in A4. In these cases, I get “cassette” storage boxes. You simply label them and throw any bulky items in them (can you see I am a chucker ). If you were to sell the house or the car. All you have to do is get the bulky folder and maybe the simple A4 folder in your standard system.
If you have very complicated paperwork
Years ago, I did this amazing job for this lovely couple who had a company that owned properties. Some properties were owned by one person, another property by another. This became a knot of paperwork in their minds – logically. We ended up moving the piles and I think I created a diagram of parent categories:
Company
Person X or Person Y
the respective property then lived underneath the mother category.
Some of the setup of the company needed its own file. Whereas continuous paperwork like tax and tenant information had their own folders. We ended up with a three-drawer file system. With one drawer being dedicated to properties and with a Parent folder they belonged to.
Organise paperwork - active and nonactive paperwork
Some paperwork was active (tenant information, small maintenance jobs) it needed to be taken into consideration each year for Tax. We set up 7 folders for the 7 years you need to keep taxable income and information in Australia.
Other information for these properties like purchase and sale contracts aka long-term legal contracts were kept separate (nonactive). You need to think about retrieval a bit when you set something like this up. I need to be able to retrieve xx for tax and other xxx papers when I sell my property. This setup was complex and time-consuming initially. But it saved them hundreds of dollars and hours of time the next year on the cost of tax preparation. In that year the accountant didn’t have to wade through a mountain of information. They could see how it related to each other.
If you have a really complicated set up reach out to me. Depending on my workload at that time. I might do some coaching with you to set up your paperwork for good.
Longterm paper-based storage
The final stage of any paperwork (before shredding) is long-term storage. Some things you need to keep for Tax, others for legal reasons. If it is not appropriate to keep it in a file, folder, or cassette. And it is likely you will never look at these papers ever again. I place papers in paper document folders. Write their content and year on it and file it in bulk in the garage. Every year I quickly scan through this and chuck or shred what can go.
How to organise paperwork - Electronic filing
What if you want to retrieve the information? The setup described above should help you find most things in your paper-based system. However, retrieving information is easier in electronic format provided you file in a proactive way. So here we enter the wonderful world of file names. As we want to utilise the search function on the computer. Whilst we can still use the same folder structure as in your physical setup.
“Be clear on what you are filing.”
What is it that you are filing? If you needed to find this again in 6 months’ time. What is the term you would use to look it up? Use this term and make things very clear in the title.
“Try to answer what, why, how, who in the file name.”
You see folders really aren’t necessary for our modern electronic systems. If the name is clear you can use the search term and find the document. However, our brain and physical environment still likes to use a few folders so feel free to use them. If however, you have many folders with 1-10 documents in them you are not working in the most efficient way. If you name your files well, folders are helpful. But they are not as important because you can find the document anyway via search.
Folders and some structure
One of the benefits of a folder structure is that you can skip the name of the folder. If you have a parent category that you use frequently. For example health, legal, study then you can skip the folder name.
For example, if I have a folder Health instead of calling the document:
HEALTH_Sabine_2020
I would place it in the Health folder and call it
20210822_Sabine day surgery_knee
This would help me with retrieval, I know who, when, what (year person, and subject) the paperwork is referring to. I am still very clear with my title. As I am already in the space, (the health folder – which is the parent category), where it should be.
If I wanted to. I could create a child folder for each family member. Then I could place items on year dates (it really depends on how much information I get per year).
File things on date
For work I often find we make documents and don’t know when to use it next. Or what the parent folder would be, so this is what I do.
A folder is called Sabine work. Each file gets a date when I last worked on it. This will be written the American way as your files will automatically fall into sequential order. 3 March 2022 will be 20220303. The 5th of May will fall behind the earlier date as it is written 20220505.
At the end of each year, I file all my stuff for the year in a folder e.g. 2022. This forces me to retrieve it from the previous year. If I need it and it basically shows what is document “rot”.
When you leave a job or do your yearly maintenance. Ask yourself do I need to keep information from 3 jobs ago? No. just delete the whole folder. Do you need to keep files for 1999 – no (unless they are photos) so delete. What this filing on date does is equivalent to a yearly paper-based cull. Important things like Finances, Health, and Legal will have their own folder. But everyday paperwork can be cleaned in the standard “work – per x date” way.
As you saw with my example above I do like the "date method". So if I have medical, legal or financial paperwork. I still like to use the "date method" as it keeps things automatically in chronological order.
You can learn all this and more
In my book “How to organise your home and paperwork”. I’ll discuss the above techniques in detail.
Home filing system – final thoughts
Getting to the end of this page you might feel one of two things:
Ready to learn more and continue to refine your paper-based setup and do more organising.
Alternatively, you might feel utterly overwhelmed.
Depending on how you feel, I recommend the following:
If you are confident about your paper-based systems. It is time to focus on your electronic files. You do this by organising your computer files, your desktop, passwords, your outlook contacts, and your finances.
However, if you are feeling overwhelmed start with simpler organising projects. Like your kitchen or a bedroom to build momentum and confidence. If you need to get papers sorted and fairly soon. I would encourage you to find a professional organiser in your area. We love doing this type of work. Are good at it and the investment will pay dividends on multiple levels now and in the future.
“Organising paperwork – Isn’t easy, so make sure you are nice to yourself!”
Paperwork isn’t the easiest of organising projects. I therefore don’t suggest you start here in your organising journey. But having your home office and paperwork organised will save you hours once it is set up. It will reduce stress, save money and make weekly admin tasks so much easier.
Once you have learned how to organise paperwork paper based and electronic you can simply maintain this. You only need to learn how to organise basic life admin which is the daily and weekly admin maintenance we all should do if we want our lives to run smoothly.
Serious about organising your paperwork?
Do the online course where I’ll walk you through this process step-by-step.
