Home Paper Organization
Organizing the paper that comes into your home can be a nightmare. With bills, junk mail, what the kids bring home from school, it can all seem overwhelming. But as with every organizational challenge in your home, all it takes is a little planning. Here are two tips to help you get and keep the home paper organization in shape in your home.
Have a home paper organization plan.
This one is probably the most critical step in getting the paper in your home organized. If you do not have a plan,
chances are that the paper that comes into your home simply ends up wherever it lands. This is especially a bad situation when you have bills or important mail that you treat this way. This can lead to late payments, late fees and other things that negatively affect your current finances and your future financial situation.
So how do you get a home paper organization plan? Decide what you will do with every piece of paper that comes into your home. Now depending on the piece of paper, this will affect where it belongs. Let me explain. Chances are that you do not need your kids’ arts and crafts projects from school in the same place that the bills go. So have a designated space in your home for incoming arts and crafts projects and a separate space for your bills. Bills would logically go in your home office while arts and crafts projects could go in your kids’ rooms or in a certain “display” area of the home. Deciding where the paper in your house logically belongs is important for getting it organized in a way that you actually use and can keep up with. And that brings us to point number 2.
Stick to your home paper organization plan.
Easier said than done, I know. But critical if you want to stay on top of the paper that makes it way into your home. So how do you do this? One way is to get the whole family involved in the paper organization plan. Get their buy-in to the plan and more importantly, get their agreement to follow the plan. Having a plan that no one follows is not going to get you very far. Make sure that everyone is clear on the plan so there are no excuses for not following it.
Another way to make sure that your home paper organization plan is followed is to make sure that there are appropriate consequences for not following the plan. One consequence might be that anyone who does not follow the plan has to organize all of the paper that comes into the house the next day. Decide on what works for you but having consequences for not following the plan can help everyone in the house (including you!) keep up with it.
