A Day In My Life

I ordered and received Maria Gracia’s My Oh-So-Organized Filing System. Yesterday, Jay and I completely emptied our filing cabinet, and took everything into the dining room. He got one of our plastic packing crates for trash, and one for items needing to be shredded, and we set to work. We put the filing system’s labels on file folders, according to our specific needs. Then we went through every single hanging file, file folder and sheet of paper we own. We discarded enough to fill our trash crate, and put some into the shred bin. Everything else went into appropriate folders. The process took six and a half hours, and we were exhausted by the time we finished…but now, we can literally put our hands on any single piece of documentation in seconds. It is so worth it to have spent the time. The system is easy to use, as we discovered today when we had a few stray items to file. I put labels on three drawers of the filing cabinet until we know where each category is by practice/use. The fourth drawer is for notebooks for my job, which were taking up floor space until this morning. I felt a huge sense of relief when I realized that nine years of tax documents are arranged by date order, newest first, in one single folder that is not bulging, with paper falling out of it. That was when I knew this system is a keeper. The extra file folder labels that we do not need currently are stored for future use, as our needs change. This is one more area of disorganized clutter we no longer have to deal with, and it is so welcome.