Hilarie Joyful: Project Simplify - Week 2

Yes, you may have noticed it has been many more than one week since my last Project Simplify post. I completed the work that week, but I didn't get it online. Oops!
To recap, Simplemom.net is doing an organizing project each week for five weeks. It's great to have a little voice telling you what to clean each week.

Week 2 was paper clutter. All forms.

I thought we didn't have too much paper clutter. I mean, we do - it comes in every day. Newspaper, mail, kids' papers from school (why are there so many???), etc. But I am fairly ruthless. I just can't take the mess. The kids' papers get thrown out daily unless there is an action item or I want to scan/save it. (New plan is to scan things rather than keeping them. Although I think I'll keep a handful from each year. That's enough!) So, I thought it wasn't too bad.

But then I got to my office. Otherwise known as "the place everything goes that no one wants to deal with". My desk was fairly clean, but the filing cabinet was bursting at the seams. Every time I try to get a new piece of paper in there, it's a battle. So, that had to be cleaned out. Along with my work files. I realized I've been paper-free (no physical files) for 6 years or so, but I had a drawer full of old files. Why??

So, the inital pile, after pulling everything out that I could think of looked something like this:

We had pretty much every house document packet from every new loan and refinance. This house and prior houses. There is no reason I needed all of those (and they're huge!). The oddest find was all of my bills from 2007. I must have set them aside at some point in 2008, waiting to shred them until I was sure I wouldn't need anything - and then they got buried and forgotten. Oops!

After dealing with all of that (shredding most, recycling some), I realized I had a couple years worth of issues of the one magazine I subscribe to (Creating Keepsakes). I never go back and look at old issues, so I'm not sure why I was keeping them. Time to go!

I did thumb through and pulled out just a few things I might like to reference again. But for that huge stack of magazines, I pulled out maybe 10 pages or so. That's it!

One of the best parts of this was walking past Mark's "office" (otherwise known as "the place where everything that I won't allow into my office ends up" or "the place where things that might someday be sold, donated, or thrown out if I could just get in there when he's not looking") and seeing HIM going through all of his paperwork, too. Maybe I inspired him! (I'm not sure why he has paperwork, because I feel like I have everything in my filing cabinet. But, whatever. He does seem to have paperwork.)

Just today, I happened to remember that I had an entire file box full of work papers. Manuals, old calculations, etc. I haven't referenced these in at least 10 years, and most of the systems are no longer being used. Time for ALL of it to go!

The result of all of this is a much roomier file cabinet. Plus several bags of recycled papers. And a pile of recycled magazines. And a few bags of shredded paperwork.