The second Tuesday of March is National Organize Your Home Office Day.
I have posted dozens of articles about paper management and office organizing. Just last 
week, I was reminded of the importance of having a Home for Your Papers, and wanted to share!
Think about the idea of “Home”. If a person has a home, you can typically find them there. They start and end their day there. If you need to send them something, you send it to their home so it’s waiting for them when they arrive. A person’s home is their default, their normal resting place.
Our important papers need the same thing. Our papers need a home so we can find them again, pair them with related papers, and keep them safe.
(A word about technology: Any of these suggestions also work if you keep only digital records of your information instead of actual paper!)
There are three main categories of important papers.
- Active papers: Papers that require a further action soon. Bills to pay, coupons for an
upcoming purchase, forms to complete and return. The most important thing about Active Papers is to take action on them, so their HOME needs to be convenient and close at hand.
For example, when I finished opening mail with a client recently, we had just a few small piles of papers to deal with. After I filed some passive papers, we set up her bills to pay, and she tucked into her purse the village vehicle sticker info and some coupons for her errands later in the day. - Passive Papers: Passive papers are papers we need to keep for a certain amount of time, like paid bills or bank statements or tax returns. We need to keep them for a certain amount of time, and then we need to make sure we purge / recycle / shred them once in a while, so they don’t pile up and we end up with 20 years of paid utility bills in a file drawer, or grocery receipts from 6 years ago in a shoebox. The most important thing to remember about Passive Papers is to put them away instead of leaving them pile here and there, and to regularly purge them, like once a month or once a year, so that they don’t accumulate.
For example, today I went through bank statements with a client to prepare to do her taxes. It was easy to find the necessary statements since ONLY 2017 and a few 2018 statements were in the file – all the others are bundled up with previous year taxes and cleared out of the drawer! - Archival Papers are Papers that we need to keep for the long term. Birth / marriage / sacramental certificates, social security cards and pass ports, house purchase papers, car or boat titles,
wills, etc. The most important thing to remember about Archival Papers is to protect them, so their HOME needs to offer protection (a safe or a bank safety deposit box) and may be a little less convenient to access. But that’s OK, since we don’t need to access Archival Papers often. For example, I registered my youngest for high school last Saturday and his birth certificate and social security number were both required. Grabbing both took all of 10 seconds, since we have one and only one very safe and specific place for such vital documents. And of course, I PUT THEM BACK when I was done with them! - There are probably more than 3 types of papers, if we add in memorabilia or photos, but those will be a discussion for another day!
So, as we think about organizing our Home Office on National Organize Your Home Office Day, make sure to have HOMES for these three types of papers.
- Active work space and open storage for tackling your to-do pile, and time set aside in your
schedule to take care of business. - Closed storage, perhaps a file cabinet drawer or a desk drawer, for your passive papers. Plus, a regular habit to regularly (weekly or monthly) file passive papers, and every month or year to purge your outdated passive papers. And
- Safe storage, perhaps a portable safe or a locking file cabinet drawer, for your important archival records and vital documents, so you can always find them when you need them.
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