28. 6 Tips for Organizing Papers
Episode 28
Why is it that we can be in the most digital age we’ve ever been in as a human species, yet still be surrounded by paper?!
Work papers, school papers, and home papers can clutter our spaces and stress us out. Do you throw it away? Keep it forever? File it in a drawer? Scan it into the computer?
In this week’s episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, we cover 6 tips to finally organizing the papers that are taking over your space and your mind. As always, the tips are based on my foundational principle of keeping things simple.
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
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28 6 Tips for Organizing Papers
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[00:00:00] Well, hello there and welcome to episode 28 of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. If you are new here, welcome. And I am so happy to have you. And if you have been around for a little bit, welcome back. I am also so glad to have you.
In this episode, we are going to talk about one of those nuisance things that seems to accumulate no matter how hard we try to get rid of it. As soon as we throw one away, another one magically appears. And what else could this be besides paper?
In this episode, I'm going to share six tips for organizing papers so that you feel less overwhelmed by the chaos and more. In control of your work and study space and perhaps even your home.
If you look around the room that you're in right now, perhaps even the car safely if you are listening to this while driving, and if you see a pile of papers anywhere. In your line of vision, then this episode is for you.
So [00:01:00] without wasting another minute, let's dive in.
All right.
Like I said, I am going to share six tips for organizing papers. But this is not a step-by-step how to do it in this exact order kind of episode. I am sharing tips, not steps. Okay? And so the tips are in no particular order per se, but they are all things that I want you to keep in mind whenever you decide that you have had enough and your paper organization needs some TLC. Deal? Alright.
My first tip for organizing papers [00:02:00] is to pick one location and start there.
Now, I know that many of you are students and many of you are working professionals and many of you are both and some of you are living in dorms or apartments or homes. And so. All of our paper situations look different. But managing and organizing papers can be overwhelming if we attempt to tackle all of the areas of our multiple lives at one time.
And so we're not going to do that. And that is why I want you to start with one area, perhaps the areas that's giving you the most like negative energy when you walk by it.
So if you're a student that could be your study space, or maybe your dorm. If you're a working professional, this could be your desk, at your office or maybe your home desk.
Of course, we have papers that have nothing to do with school and work.
Right? This is like the papers that come into our homes and our living [00:03:00] spaces all of the time. Things like mail and forms that need to be filled out medical things, our kids school stuff.
I know that for me personally, that's where I tend to accumulate the most papers home life, because I cannot stop my kids from bringing papers home from school.
And I definitely can't stop my doctor's office from sending me bills. But to stay within the context of what I promise to talk about on this podcast, I'm going to stick to the context of school and work and not necessarily home life. Okay. But you can certainly apply the strategies that I talk about today to organizing your home papers.
All right. So, got that out of the way. Back to the tip. Are you going to start with the papers in your work desk? Are you going to start in your backpack in your study space? Perhaps a filing cabinet? Maybe the pile on the floor under your desk? Choose a place to start. And I [00:04:00] suggest starting with a pile that is somewhat like substantial so that you can actually make a dent.
If you have like three papers laying around somewhere. Organizing those isn't so much, it's not going to give you the boost of motivation that we're looking for. Okay. We're talking like a pile.
So this tip involves getting as concrete as possible. Maybe saying something like I am going to organize the paper is in my workspace, on my office or in my office. When we're clear and specific about what we're going to do and where we're going to start a project, we increase our motivation for doing it because clarity is the enemy of procrastination.
Clarity is the enemy of procrastination.
Tip two for organizing papers, and remember, this is in no particular order. is to create a final destination for the papers that you choose to keep.
If you have a filing cabinet, that's probably for most of us, that's great. But if you have no final destination for your papers then you are asking for your papers to continue to [00:05:00] grow in a pile.
Whether you choose to process your papers once a week or maybe every day or once a month, that is up to you.
And that's actually another tip that we're going to talk about in just a minute. So sit tight.
But you are going to need a final resting place, so to speak for your papers. And like I said, for many of us that is a filing cabinet, um, or maybe it's a digital folder if your goal is to scan everything that comes in, that's up to you.
But let's go back to tip one where I suggest that you start with one location. So for the sake of this example, we are going to pretend that you are starting with the papers that are accumulating in your work space in your office.
So you would gather the papers that are piled in your office. Yes. You're actually have to go through every single one of these and do something with them. There is a good chance that some of these papers ended up in a pile because there was no final resting place for them to go.
[00:06:00] If you knew the minute these papers came in, like where to put them and they had a very clear, final destination, you probably would have put it there sooner than you did, or I guess you didn't at this point.
For example, I have a folder in my home filing cabinet that says pets. And every time I bring one of my pets to the vet and I get paperwork, I drop that paper in the folder that says pets.
If I didn't have a folder that said pets, I would probably keep that piece of paper on my kitchen counter for a very long time.
So look at your papers. You have to ask yourself, do these papers have a place to go. If they do, that's great.
Now in just a minute, we are going to talk about. Uh, creating a processing system, like a frequency, right, and creating a system for that. But if your, um, papers already have a final [00:07:00] destination that they just haven't made it to yet, your paper processing system is probably where you could use a little adjustment and we're going to get there.
But if your papers don't even have a final destination, We're going to need to create one. Okay.
So starting with whatever pile you choose to start with- I often advise to form categories. So sit down with an open surface, maybe a dining room table, and start putting the papers in different piles or different categories. Maybe you have five pieces of paper that have to do with a certain. I don't know, client's account. Um, 10 pieces of paper that are receipts that you need to give to HR.
Maybe you have several pieces of paper that are notes that you've taken from your last, I don't know, seven meetings. This scenario is different for each of us, right? Because if you're a student, your papers are going to have different categories. But the idea here is to figure out what types of papers are you collecting? What [00:08:00] categories of papers are you collecting?
What categories do you see forming on the workspace in front of you? Once you do that, then you can start figuring out what the final destination place will be for each of your piles. So one quick tip, though, if you have some like rogue paper, that's singular, it's a one-off thing, you probably don't need to create a folder or final destination for it.
Maybe you can just throw it away.
But if you are noticing patterns that you're collecting certain types of papers, then it's safe to say that you could probably create a file for that type of paper. A tip about categories, which would essentially be like the names of folders, right. Is to keep them on the general side.
So you would have a folder that says pets instead of a separate folder for each of your pets. Even if you had nine cats. Okay.
Now tip three- again, this [00:09:00] is in no particular order- is to store things like your future self is looking for them. I love this tip. I love teaching this tip. The whole reason we keep any paper at all is so that we can access it in the future. Right.
I mean, if we had no intention of ever accessing a piece of paper again, we would just throw it away. Wouldn't we?. Yes. Okay. So operating under the assumption here that every piece of paper you're choosing to keep will be something that you'll want to find again. So when it comes time to put our papers in folders, whether it's digital or physical, I want you to think like someone who is looking for that piece of paper in the future. We're going to go back to my pet example.
If you are listening to this, this won't be relevant. But if you are watching this on the learn and work smarter YouTube channel, I am wearing my sweater with cats on it. [00:10:00]
And believe it or not, I did not plan that for this episode. Um, it was just a shirt that I have not yet worn, um, for a podcast. I don't have that many clothes and I try not to wear the same shirts in my SchoolHabits YouTube videos, and my Learn and Work Smarter podcasts. Whatever. This is a the cat shirt. All right.
Anyways. If for some reason, I wanted to find the receipt for my really fancy Siberian cat. His name is Martin. I know that my future self would think to go to a folder called pets and not to my receipts folder.
Because the first thing that comes to my mind when I think cat is the word pet. And not receipt.
So I would store that receipt in my folder labeled pets. Now what I hear a lot from my adult clients is that [00:11:00] they get stuck at this point. They argue with themselves because they're like, yeah, but isn't it also a receipt and yes. It is.
But speaking for myself, my organization system needs to work for me. And how my brain operates. And I know that when I think cat, I think pet. But if you and your heart of hearts, think of the word receipt when you think of the word cat, then I suppose you could keep that in your receipts folder.
All right. A another example would be something like meeting notes.
Let's say that you take notes at weekly meetings and you like to keep these notes for future reference. Let's say that during one of these weekly meetings, you take notes on a big company project, um, that is about to be rolled out or whatever. So all of the notes that you take that particular day in that particular meeting are about that [00:12:00] particular project.
So question: would you store this piece of paper in your folder called meeting notes, or would you store it in a folder that has information all about that big company project? Like maybe the name of the project or whatever? Again, you need to make that decision based on how your own brain operates.
If your future self were looking for the notes that you took during a meeting about the project, would you instinctively think I should check my meeting notes folder? Or would you instinctively think I should check the company project folder? I don't want you to think too hard about this. It needs to be instinctual. Okay.
It is always going to be an issue with paper organization that something can fit into more than one category. That is just one of those sort of annoying things that we have to deal with when we organize papers.
That's why paper organization is such a pain in the bum for most people.
If you're storing things digitally, we get around this by using things like tags, and we can add [00:13:00] multiple tags to a file, but this episode is about organizing papers, not digital stuff.
Right. And so we can't do that. We can't use tags.
Now it is always possible that you could store this, you know, physical paper in a, in a folder called meeting notes, and then you could scan it into a digital folder with the, you know, company project name. That's up to you. But I stand by the idea that you want to store things where your future self would organically look for them.
The next tip for organizing papers is to have as little friction as possible. When creating any kind of system, whether it's task management, time management, email management, right, we always want to think about reducing friction.
In terms of organizing papers this means that we want to make our paper organization system as touchless as possible.
That means avoiding storing things in clasped folders, within locked file cabinets that are behind another [00:14:00] piece of furniture and are really hard to access. If possible, we should be able to store something in two touch points or less -or less is kind of hard, but two touch points.
That means opening a drawer and pulling on a file folder or grabbing one of those like upright sort of vertical magazine files or whatever, and pulling out a pocketed folder or whatever, you know, storage system you're using.
If it's a pain in the bum to put your paper in its final destination, it will never make it to its final destination.
A true personal story is that I am fortunate enough to have a home office as well as my business office, where I meet with clients and in my home office where I still do a ton of my business work, I have a filing cabinet that is strictly for home and family papers. There's no work papers that go in there.
And I found myself, this is like actually a while ago, but getting in this habit of bringing mail or receipts or whatever, in, from the mailbox or the kitchen and bringing them into my office and putting them on top [00:15:00] of my filing cabinet. It's like, I got so close.
Why don't I just put them, like in the filing cabinet? Like what was wrong with me? But honestly, when I thought about it, I took my own medicine and I evaluated myself and I realized that there was too much friction. Because the folders inside the filing cabinet were just too jam packed.
And every time I took out a folder to put a paper away, the folder would fall apart.
It would sort of like snag on a, another folder, too much friction. It was honestly so annoying. And now though I have no paper piles on top of my filing cabinet. Why?
Because I went through my filing cabinet and I reduced the number of folders that were in there. I went through some of the folders.
I got rid of some of the papers, but now it's just like, It's like frictionless. If I have a piece of paper that I bring into my office is so easy to just open the filing cabinet. Now I don't have to take the folder out because there's enough space at the folder kind of just like falls open and I can plop the paper inside, whereas before it was so [00:16:00] crammed that I had like. You know, like pull the folder out.
Cause there was no space for it to, you know what I'm saying? Like to drop open. I couldn't drop the paper in. But then when I'd pull the folder out, everything would get snagged.
But now I don't mind it. I've done the same thing with my closet. I know we're talking about. You know, Paper. Right. But if you end up with a ton of like clothes on your floor, ask yourself, is it too annoying?
Is there too much friction to put your clothes away? Do you have too many hangers? Right? Is, are your drawers over stuffed? First world problems right. But it's, it's true.
It happens to my kids. They get so many clothes. And. I mean, they only wear the same, like three hoodies over and over again. But when their clothes end up in the floor, it's to me a sign that their drawers overstuffed and there's too much friction for them putting it away.
Does that make sense?
Okay. Tip five for organizing papers is to process papers regularly.
It is one thing to have the nicest folders, the sleekest filing cabinet the most modern digital scanner. But [00:17:00] if you have no system, For processing your papers, we're all always going to end up with a disorganized piles.
So, what do I mean by process papers?
It's simple. When you hold a piece of paper in your hand, we need to assess what it is. Assess whether we need to keep it or trash it. And if we need to keep it, we need to take a minute to bring it to its final destination.And we would do this for all of the papers that are piling up in a particular area, your work desk, your study space, your backpack. The top of your filing cabinet.
There is no right frequency for processing your papers.
Okay. For some of us, maybe once a week is just fine. Some of us, we might need to do this daily. I would say it really depends on how many papers are coming in um, into your life, how many of those papers are typically junk and can just be like trashed, right? And not even processed at all. How many papers are important and need to be stored?
I am. Absolutely not going to say anything [00:18:00] at all like everybody needs to clear all the papers from their desks at the end of every day, or everybody needs to do a paper organization routine on Sundays.
That's not at all how systems work.Now my mission with the learn and work smarter podcast is to teach, you know, strategies to students and professionals so that you can learn and work smarter. And that means teaching you ways to evaluate if what you are currently doing is working or not working. My goal in other words is not to tell everybody to do things a certain way.
There is a right way and a wrong way. No, the right way is the way that works. Okay.
Now some signs that you would look for to determine how frequently you should be going through your paper piles is to ask yourself, do I have too many papers around me? Am I losing papers? Can I not find papers when I need them or in a, in the [00:19:00] wrong spot? Is my school and work life harder and more chaotic because my papers are not organized.The answers to these questions will inform whether you should be going through and processing your papers you know, um, once a week, three times a week, every day, maybe monthly, if you're not getting many papers at all right?
One strategy that works for both my student clients and my adult working clients is to make paper organization part of a larger routine. So for example, If you're a student and you tend to get a messy backpack and your papers end up all squished at the bottom, you might make a Sunday routine where every Sunday you organize your papers, you put them in the right folder, or you take out your calendar.
Um, and you update your calendar for the week. You are looking at your syllabus and you're doing some planning. Maybe have a cup of tea or a cup of coffee when you're doing this.
If you're in the workforce, maybe you make paper organization part of like a, um, end of the week [00:20:00] sort of shutdown routine.
So you take the last 10 minutes on a Friday before you leave the office and you organize your papers, you process some emails, you close out your tasks from the week. Maybe you leave a small to-do list on your desk for when you return on Monday. Right. Regardless of the frequency, that you end up with daily, weekly, whatever, I do like to suggest that once a year, we go into our primary storage receptacle- so probably a filing cabinet for most of us- and do some maintenance.
Because so many papers become irrelevant even after just one year. Even when we swore they were so important when we filed them away. So once a year go in there with a lens of trash.
Okay. The sixth and final tip for organizing papers is to have a single location for active papers.So we've all been in the situation before, where we're working on a project and it's not like a one and done thing with like a [00:21:00] clear, like, You can sit down in one sitting and do it. Maybe it's a research paper, or maybe it's an English analysis. or book essay or, you know, Ongoing work project or whatever. I know everything is digital, but there will be times when you have physical papers attached to this ongoing project that you know, you're going to come back to the next day. This is what I would call active papers.
You are actively using them and it wouldn't make sense to file them away until the project is like completely done. So for these scenarios, it is perfectly fine to leave the papers out on your work or your study space. Leaving papers out that you are actively using and, and working with is not lazy.
It's not disorganization. It's actually practical. Okay?, but I still want you to be a little intentional here. A paper tray, like a single paper tray is excellent for collecting active papers until they are ready to be put in their final destination.
Maybe even just tidy them up with a binder clip. But the idea is that I want you to store [00:22:00] all of these papers in one location neatly somewhere where you know exactly where they are when you need them again.
And then when you're done with them and the project is like totally over, you decide whether you can throw them away or if they need to go somewhere more permanent.
Now this tip still works if you tend to work or study in different locations each day, so maybe you need to bring these active papers with you, um, from class to home, to the library, to work, uh, back to your home office, right?In this case, you could simply put all of these papers in a folder and you can call this folder active. Write it on the front. And it would go where you go.
And instead of having your papers all over the place, when you changed locations and perhaps forgetting a paper in one location, you wish you had it with you, whatever they're all in your trusty folder. Makes sense.Okay. That my friends was the sixth and final tip for organizing papers. I know the list could be a mile long, but I wanted to keep the tips [00:23:00] simple and practical.
I am going to recap the tips six tips. Now it's so hard and just remember they are in no particular order. They are not sequential.Okay. Tip number one was to pick one location and start there.
Tip number two is to create a final destination for the papers that you choose to keep.
Tip three is to store things like your future self would be looking for them.Tip four is to have as little friction as possible.
Tip five is to process things regularly, and tip six is have a single location for all your active papers.
I hope this was helpful.
Please share this podcast with someone you think might like it, maybe a colleague or a student. And let me know that you have been enjoying it by leaving a review in the podcast app you are using, or by leaving a comment if you are watching this on the learn and work smarter YouTube channel. I appreciate you.
Thank you so much. And as always. Never stop [00:24:00] learning.
