Neatnik Amanda vs. a Professional Organizer: Important Paper Peril

While you were at Amanda’s house, you were all fired up about getting your house organized.  Saturday you vowed, “I’m going to get this place organized if it’s the last thing I do.”  You get up early and decide you’ll start with the paper clutter on the kitchen table.  So, all the clutter from the dining room table goes on the floor.  Then you take all the piles of paper from the kitchen and sort them into smaller piles on the dining room table.  Then you go through those piles and make more piles.  At 4 o’clock, you look around your dining room and want to cry.  You’re tired and discouraged and now you have stuff on the floor as well as paper on the table.  You’ve made dozens of piles but still don’t know what to do with all that paper.  You know what Amanda would do at this point.  She’d grab your shredder and start stuffing things in.  She’d say, “This stuff is so old it doesn’t matter anymore.”  There are papers in there you know you need to keep.  They should probably be filed, but the file cabinet is full.  You don’t even remember what’s in there, and you can’t find anything in the overstuffed, disorganized cabinet.

You’ve done what a Professional Organizer (PO) calls “churning”—moving stuff around without making any decisions.  This is where a PO can really help you.  A PO, while not an attorney or a tax expert, knows which papers are important.  She’ll help you with a decision process to speed up the sorting and the best way to store your vital information.  She’ll have lots of ideas that will make filing and finding things much easier. 

I like the systems from FreedomFiler^® because they’re color coded and help you to know what to keep and for how long.  What would you rather do, let Amanda grab and shred, or have a professional help you organize your important papers and develop a tidy filing system so you can find them again?

Copyright^© 2019 Elizabeth Tawney Gross, Organizing For Everyday, LLC