009 - The Lisa Glossary Part 9: The Paper Solution

Thanks for listening to this special playlist of the Organized 365 Podcast. The Organized 365 Podcast started in 2014. With over 500 episodes and 15 million downloads, we know there is a lot of content to sift through. This taste of the Organized 365 Podcast is just a taste of what you can find in the full podcast and is easy to share with your family and friends who want to join you on your quest to learn the skill of organizing and grow your mindset of what is possible as you move into a proactive and purposeful life. Enjoy this podcast curation of the Organized 365 Podcast that will take you through all the big ideas we have uncovered in the last 7+ years of podcasting. Along the way, I, Lisa Woodruff, have created a whole new glossary of terms for us to use to define and understand the invisible work and belief systems we have from our childhoods and how and why homes function the way they do.

This week's mailbag comes to us from Holly. The Sunday Basket and the Friday Workbox, along with the Workbox Planning Day, have helped me so much to do life without too much stress. Without this support, I don't think I would have been able to handle my recent unexpected event with so much ease and acceptance. My son was going into quarantine from a possible exposure at school. I was able to quickly put my outstanding to-dos and notes in their appropriate slash pockets back in the boxes and go pick him up to see what was next. I didn't lose anything I was thinking of beforehand and was able to pick up where I left off later. This year and quarter in my business and in my life was a big deal for me. I look back and most of the things I set out to do this quarter are done now. The planning day is an incredible resource, and I'm growing beyond what I thought possible. Here's to more in 2022. Calm growth and acceptance it is. Acceptance of myself and who I am, ready to become who I'm gonna be. I think I'm on the right track towards work-life fusion, however imperfectly. Thanks for reminding me of tools to be more productive rather than just busy while giving myself grace at the same time. Thanks, Holly. Do you have an Organize365 success story? If so, we would love to hear it. Please send us an email at customerservice@organize365.com and tell us how you have taken back your home, your paper, and your life with Organize365.

Welcome to the Organized 365 Podcast. I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert, and motivational speaker Lisa Woodruff. This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting functional organizing in your home. I have so much to share with you. So let's get started. Paper is my thing. I love writing on paper. I love organizing paper. I just love everything about paper. And as I grew the Organized 365 brand and company, both doing in-person organization and creating online courses and lessons, I realized that I look at paper just a little bit differently than everyone else does. Truth be told, most professional organizers love to tackle your garage, your storage room, your kitchen, your whatever. But when it comes to paper, there's just not a lot of information out there about how to organize paper. And I don't think anybody had looked at paper as long as I had to figure out the categories that paper falls into naturally and how we actually use paper in our everyday life. And how our organizational systems for paper can be better structured. So I learned early on, and if you listened to the Glossary episode number 3, you heard all about how I created the Sunday basket and how that organizes your daily papers and your projects and is a weekly habit that keeps your house running more smoothly. And reference paper, like your filing cabinet paper or papers yet to be filed that may be stacked in boxes and, hidden all over your house. We usually don't think about that paper very often because the truth of the matter is 80% of what you file in your filing cabinet, you'll never need again. It's probably higher than that. Like we tend to save and file things that we don't necessarily go back and find in a filing cabinet. And so since we don't go back and we don't find this stuff and we very rarely need these papers, it's kind of out of sight is out of mind. And so I was starting to get really, really excited about these things that I had figured out about paper, but nobody really wanted to talk to me about them. They were like, Lisa, we're in the digital age. Lisa, there is no paper. I even went to New York for a weekend to pitch my book idea and learn about how I could get The Paper Solution published. And the editors and the book agents and everyone looked at me and they said, we're in a digital society. We don't need paper. So I came back from New York in 2017 and I put the Paper Solution manuscript idea on hold and I set about, you know, really diving into, okay, well then let's just talk about how we organize our house. And I worked on the podcast episodes and creating the 100-Day Home Organization program. And then sure enough, as soon as people started getting their home organized, they would message me or they would email me and they would say, Lisa, I have so much paper. What do I do with all this paper? I was like, I knew it. I knew people had paper. And another reason why I didn't really dive into what I knew about paper was because Marie Kondo had told everyone that you didn't need to keep any of your paper. You could just declutter it all. Literally in "The Magic Art of Tidying Up," she has like a 3-page chapter on paper that says just get rid of all of it. And so whenever I would talk to anyone about organizing paper, they would say, "Yeah, Marie Kondo said get rid of all your paper." And I'm like, "Oh my goodness." But in my life, I knew that paper had saved me. Like it saved me when I was settling my dad's estate. It saved me when we were his power of healthcare. It saved me when I was advocating for my kids' IEPs. It saved me when I was advocating for my kids when I went to different doctors with different diagnoses and different medical treatments. And I just knew that in my personal life, I needed paper. And every time I needed paper, it was a really expensive, costly event with high-powered professional people. And I was using paper to substantiate that I knew what I was talking about. And it was the paper that gave me the authority and the bandwidth to talk to lawyers and doctors and principals and superintendents of schools. They would pay attention to me when I had a piece of paper. But when I said the same exact information without paper, it was like, "Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh." This woman's just talking to me. So that was my life experience. And then I started helping people and they actually got their whole house organized. And they said, Lisa, I didn't think I had paper, but now that the house is organized, I'm drowning in paper. Likewise, when I would go and help people who had lost a spouse, lost a parent, and they were processing through that life event, it was always very paper intense. So I just decided, fine, I'm just gonna write the entire manuscript. So I wrote the entire manuscript of "The Paper Solution," and once it was completely done and we were totally satisfied with it, I went back to the book agents that I had met in 2017. This would've been in 2019. And I said, look, I wrote the manuscript anyway. Here's the manuscript. Well, wouldn't you know it, in those couple of years where I went back and worked on Growing Organized 365, the company was bigger. When I went to publishers and book agents. So I had more of a platform and also my thoughts had been more refined. And just so happens that a lot of other people in the world realized that we actually had paper as well. So "The Paper Solution" was published in August of 2020 by Putnam Books. You can find it anywhere that you find books, including on Audible. And now that people were starting to realize that we had paper, I could really have the conversation about like, okay, what people How much paper do we have? How are we going to save it? What do we use paper for? And let's move forward. So when I, I mentioned earlier that Marie Kondo had told a lot of people that you could just get rid of your paper. I realized that paper is very specific to the country that you live in. Every country deals with paper very differently. And America is very paper-based. As much as we'd like to be digital, we are very paper-based. Other countries are not as paper-based and they are more digital because they're not capitalist United States. We're very independent over here. Like, we don't wanna be told anything and we have a lot of freedoms and we have a lot of different ways of doing things. And because we have a, a lot of freedom and a lot of different ways of doing things, it makes it much harder to have a digital answer. So the first time I realized this was a few years ago when I was writing The Paper Solution. I was like, okay, Why, why do I feel like Americans cannot get rid of all their paper, and yet Marie Kondo feels like paper is completely irrelevant and unnecessary? Like, can we both be right? And the answer is yes, we absolutely both can be right. Did you know in Japan, they do not have printed birth certificates? Birth certificates in Japan are digital. So if you're an American listening to this, your mind probably is blown Like my mind was blown when I heard that. And I was like, because I had just gone to get my TSA PreCheck compliant driver's license. And in order to do that, I had to take my birth certificate and Social Security card. Like, hello, where's that little piece of paper that we never know where that is? There are all kinds of things that we do here in the United States where you have to produce a physical piece of paper. Currently at the time of this recording, it's December of 2021. And COVID is running rampant and all the countries have different vaccine protocols. And here in the United States, everything is still a physical vaccine card that we have in our wallets. And I know in Europe, they already have a digital vaccine system. We just don't have that digitization that goes throughout entire countries because our government is a collection of independent state governments. And inside of those state governments, they all have different laws. Like, we are an amalgam of a lot of different laws and rules that govern our lives. And we have a lot more freedoms. So because we have a lot more freedoms, we don't have a lot of centralized digital systems. So I was speaking at a Fortune 50 company, and the question was asked to me, Lisa Woodruff, when are we going to get to where we have an all-digital medical system where I can literally just log on to an app and see everything and everybody can see everything? And I said, I mean, I'm just a teacher and former stay-at-home mom, so I really have no knowledge, but I'm going to guess in the United States, the answer to that question is never. And I said, the reason it's never is because it's all private systems, like insurance is private and hospitals are private. And so how are you going to get a private hospital to give their records to another private hospital that's also gonna share all their records with a private insurance company, like, and then that insurance company is gonna do a system reboot and they're gonna add a different software. And how are you gonna get all of the hospitals and all of the insurance companies to all use the same? So you're not, you're not because they're all independent entities. I said, I bet in other countries this is all one thing. And then I had a podcast, a Wednesday podcast interview with Martine and she's in France. I said, hey, Let me ask you a question. What don't you have paper for in France that we have paper for in the United States? Because she's a dual citizen, I believe. And she said, oh, we have zero medical paperwork, no medical paperwork whatsoever, because our pharmacies and our insurance and our hospitals are all part of the government. And so it's all one system and it's all digitized and there is no paper. And I was like, I'll be darned.

I'm right!

I'm totally right. So because of that, good, bad, or indifferent, in America, we are going to have to have paper-based systems because at the current time, not everything is integrated, and we will probably be one of the last countries to be completely integrated because of the uniqueness of our independence and the different entities that are inside of the United States. So number 1, the paper solution. In the United States, we have paper and our paper isn't going anywhere fast. So if we have this paper, then the answer is just to get more filing cabinets or learn how to file and have great filing cabinets, right, Lisa? No, no, that is not the answer. We have tried that for a millennia. And how has it been working for you? Is your stack of papers that need to be filed bigger than the actual papers you have filed in your filing cabinet? Because that's how it was for me. Or did you just give up and get rid of everything because you didn't know how to file them? So you got rid of everything and then darn it, you needed that piece of paper and you had to go figure out how to print it out or whatever. Like, there has to be a better solution than just keeping all the paper we have filed in filing cabinets that worked in the '50s but don't work today, or getting rid of and digitizing absolutely everything that we have. There has to be a middle ground. The other reason why filing cabinets don't work is because there's no constraint in a filing cabinet. Like, you, you literally could just buy another one and then another one and then another one. Like, so by the time you're 80, 90 years old, you have like 4 and they're all full of stuff that you probably don't need. But the real reason why I have doubled down on the fact that we don't need file cabinets anymore and they really are not the right solution for Americans is because when I was starting to, in 2017, I was starting to talk on the podcast about organizing paper and coming up with all my paper organizing solutions. And those of you that were following back then were really following along and you were getting your homes organized and you had a Sunday basket and like all this. And you're like, okay, I organized my filing cabinet, Lisa, like you told me to. I had 'em like color coded in files and I got two emails in the same week in 2017, one from Texas and one from California. Both clients who had, uh, gotten their homes organized, had a Sunday basket, were following the Organized 365 system, and they both had to evacuate. One in Texas had to evacuate up into their attic, which they took an axe with them, which still, I just still cannot even imagine what that must have felt like. She said, I have I have the dog, I have the family, I have the Sunday basket, but there's not enough time and there's not enough space for me to take my entire filing cabinet up to the attic with me. And then I got an email from someone in California and they said, "We have the animals, we have the Sunday basket, we have everything in the car. We're leaving, we're evacuating because of the fires. What do I do with the rest of my paper?" And I remember typing, "You just have to leave it and go. You have to go now." And I thought, this is the worst. How can I have so ill-prepared these people who are following me as their teacher to get organized? And here they're leaving all of this paper behind, which if anything happens to their house, they're gonna need that paperwork to make the insurance claim. And if anything happens to their house, and we already know a lot is happening in their community, they need to have their time available to either be a support for their own family if needed, or those in their community. Not trying to recreate a paper trail because all of their papers got ruined in a flood or all of their papers got burned up. And then how do you— and I thought, oh, never again. Like, I never again want to have this week where people who have been following my organizational solutions reach out to me in an emergency and I don't have an answer for them. And so then the next year in 2018, after I had created the 4 binders that I'm going to tell you about in the next podcast, I got emails like this: "Hurricane Florence is on its way. We have the dog in the car, we have the kids in the car, I have my Sunday basket and my binders, and I'm evacuating now." And then the follow-up email a week later: "My house is safe, but my friend's is not. They lost their house in the hurricane, and now I'm helping them recreate what they need in their paper trail in order to get all of the insurance claims done." That's what I want. I want to be able to have— be a resource. You may not get your paper organized, you may not get your house organized proactively before the emergency happens, and then when the emergency happens, I want to say, here is the solution. And for people who live in areas where you can evacuate, having portable reference papers should be as high of a priority as having your emergency response kit and everything that you need for that. Unfortunately, I used to joke that, you know, in Ohio all we have are tornadoes. And then that horrific tornado at the end of 2021 ripped through 5 states, 5 states. Whole cities were decimated by this tornado. Like, I still cannot even comprehend how, um, just tragic the situation is with the tornadoes that went through all of those Midwest states. I'm also flabbergasted by the fact that it didn't even make a week of news. After 3 days, the news cycle had moved on, and it is going to take Kentucky years, maybe a decade, for those communities that were devastated to be rebuilt. It's just amazing to me how fast we as a society move on to the next thing. But the people who lived through the experience lived through that for years and sometimes a decade. And in that case, it doesn't matter if you have a file cabinet or binders, everything was gone. Like just everything was gone. So you cannot prepare for every single thing. But as much as we can, we buy insurance and, you know, like we do all of these other things to prepare. You know, my house, we have some extra water and flashlights and things like that. Getting your papers out of a file cabinet, only keeping the 15 to 20% you actually need in a select number of binders is great for disaster preparedness, but also it's, it's, it is really helpful for just generally daily living. Whenever you need your paper, and I'll talk about this more in the next podcast when we talk about binders, it's usually on the go. It's not when you are at home that you need your paperwork. It's You need to take it to a doctor. You need to take it to a lawyer. You need to take it wherever you need to take it. So the third thing about the paper solution is that paper organization takes time. Quite a bit of time, sorry. You know, I like that I am candid and I am honest about how long the process of organization takes. And yet I know sometimes when I'm as honest as I am, people go, well, then I'm just not doing it. And I'm like, no, you need to do it. But it, it does take time. And so I do find that people are generally pretty successful with starting to organize their house, their kitchen, their closet, their, their bedroom. And then they tend to be like, okay, I've got these spaces under control. I'm ready to set up a Sunday basket and then I'm ready to tackle the paper. And for me, organizing my own paper took an entire summer. I did it all. The summer of 2012, I went through my entire file cabinet and got rid of a large amount. And then I did it again in 2017 after I realized that the filing cabinet wasn't the answer and moved it all into binders. So that process of going through that organization is a 3-step process that I'm going to walk you through. Step 1 is the big purge. This is when you go through all the files in your file cabinet and you get rid of that 80% that I talk about. Now, here's the nice thing about this. The way I did it, very weird, but the way I did it is I just took like 5 to 10 files out of my filing cabinet at a time. Mine's in my basement. So I'd go in the basement, I would get 5 to 10 file cabinets, and I would bring them upstairs on the kitchen counter. And I just found that organizing them on the kitchen counter was so much easier than anywhere else. The kitchen counter was a nice height, so my back didn't hurt. I only did 5 or 10 files at a time, and it took me maybe 15 to 30 minutes to go through those. I was standing there, I could make quick piles because I had the big countertop to work on, and I would just recycle whatever I could, put my shredding in a different pile, and then whatever I needed to save, I put right back in the same files, and I put them back in the file cabinet. So I wasn't creating this big disorganized array of papers in my house. My filing cabinet was just shrinking within the file cabinet. The other benefit of doing it this way is sometimes I would take 15 or 20 files and I would take them over on the couch and I would go through them while I was watching TV. Or since I did it in the summer, I'd take them out on the back patio and I would sort them on the back patio and then bring back in my stacks, the ones I was keeping, the ones I was shredding, the ones I was recycling. And also, this is the weird part, I took it to the pool. Yep. My kids were middle school age, so I'd pile the kids in the car. I would literally grab like 20 file folders and all summer long, I don't even know what I, I obviously don't care what people think of me and I don't even know what people at the pool were thinking of me. I did rope one of my friends in. She was like, this is a good idea. She started sorting her paperwork at the pool too. So the two of us, We'd go to the pool, we'd sit at one of the tables, and we would sit there for like an hour and a half and sort our papers. And we'd have our 3 stacks when we went home. What was shredding, what was recycling, and what was going back in our file cabinet while we ate pizza and our kids swam in the pool. I don't know, it's portable. Paper is portable, so you can organize it that way. But that's the big purge, going through all of the boxes and files and piles. And like, paper is just so insidious. It's everywhere. When you start looking, it's in the laundry room, it's in the garage, it's in your car, it's in your nightstand, it's in— it's just, it's everywhere. And once you finally get through that purge, which if you do it in that little lackadaisical way that I did, 15 to 20 minutes a day, it could take a summer. But it's not like, oh, I have to organize the paper, because you just kind of fit it in. Like, we eat dinner, I organize paper while we chat out on the back patio, and then we go up and watch TV. Like, you just kind of fit it into your schedule somewhere. You know, right now as you're listening to this, if you're listening to this real time, it's winter. Great time to turn on the football game and sort paper, or make a nice hot fire and sort paper while you're talking with family and friends. Like, yeah, I do sort paper with family and friends. I'm a little unusual. So that's number 1. You just have to go through the paper and get rid of the 80% that you don't need. The second thing is then we have two distinct kinds of paper. You have actionable current paper and you have reference paper. Those are the two kinds of paper. The actionable current paper, that's what lives in your Sunday basket. Those are the projects that are in progress, even if they've been delayed a year. They're all of your ideas, your bill pay, all the weekly stuff. Everything I went through in Glossary Episode #3, From Overwhelm to a Plan. This takes you from living a reactive life to a proactive life, helps you empty out the thoughts in your head onto little pieces of paper into the Sunday basket because you're— this is where you start to realize that paper is not just about what gets printed on a printer. Paper is a tangible form of information and you can make your thoughts paper by writing them on index cards. You can make your emails paper by printing out important emails that have reference information or actionable information in them. So as much as you could take anything and make it tangible in a piece of paper, that's what we're talking about there. And then the third part of this paper solution is to create reference binders that replace your former filing cabinet, or if you never had one, create reference binders. And there are four essential reference binders. The first one is financial. Your financial binder will hold all of your current and future money. It is what someone would use to be a power of attorney for you or to settle an estate. The second binder is a medical binder. A medical binder is what someone would use to be the power of healthcare for you or a caregiver for you. Or for you to advocate for your own care needs or those of a loved one. The third one is a household reference binder, which is for all household maintenance and anything you would need to give a future owner of your home when you sell your home. And the fourth binder is the household operations binder. And that is all about you and what makes your home unique to you, your tasks of daily living and your cleaning schedule. So it has cleaning, meal planning, house maintenance, anything for events, anything for pets, vacations, things like that. And then Organized 365 also has 2 optional binders if you have children. One is called the Warrior Mama Binder, which is for managing all medical alternatives, which organizes your kids' medical information and education information specifically for those students that need IEPs, which are individualized education plans. And then we have a school memories binder, which stores all of your kids' artwork and papers and things like that, just like a fun scrapbook for kids' memories. So the paper solution is one, you have to purge all the paper that you have so you get down to the essential 15 to 20% that you need. You can get rid of about 80 to 85% of what you have. Then you sort what is left into Sunday Basket actionable. Back in episode 3 of this glossary, I told you about that, or you can go to SundayBasket.com. There's more information there, resources, podcasts, all of that. The Sunday Basket usually takes about 6 weeks to really get it into a system and get it going. And then the reference binders, which we're gonna talk about in the next podcast. But before I leave this podcast, I want to share one more huge part of what Organized 365 feels is part of the paper solution. So as a former teacher, I say former teacher because that's when I was paid to be a teacher by a school district, but I still feel like that's what I'm doing in Organized 365. I'm a coach, motivational inspirational speaker, but really truly I'm a teacher. Like I'm teaching the skill of organization. And as a classroom teacher and understanding that there are all different kinds of learners, and as I've been teaching the skill of organization in home, in paper, I knew before we even had a physical Sunday basket that what we absolutely had to have in Organized 365 was a team of trained professionals who understood the skill of organizing enough that they could also teach it to someone else. Because we have 3 different kinds of learners, and you can identify which kind of learner you are. The first kind of learner is really a self-directed DIY type learner, and, and this may be you, where when you have a question or when you want to learn something, you go to YouTube and you watch the video that's going to show you how to do it, or you order a how-to book, or you sign up for a course and you learn the course, and then you just do it. Like, You're able to go research, get the knowledge, and implement it all on your own. Sometimes without even paying anything, like you could just go seek the knowledge, uh, you're able to fill in anything that isn't being explained well enough by the teacher in the free version. You're able to fill in those cracks in your head and you're like, okay, yep, I understand Sunday basket, gonna make it on my own. I'm good to go. The second type of learner, which is probably the bulk of learners, is someone who could do the same thing. They can go, they could find the information that they need for the problem that they need solved. They will vet all the people that are solving that problem, and then they will find the person that resonates with them the most or speaks in the manner that they are most accustomed to or understand the best. And then they will be like, okay, I want to learn this skill with this person. So in the example of the Sunday Basket, you listen to the podcast, you like my thoughts, you get the idea, you understand how the Sunday Basket works. You either don't want to make one on your own, or you just know it's going to be easier if you just buy the $97 system that comes with everything that comes with. So you order the Sunday Basket. When you get the Sunday Basket, you're able to see all the training on there, go to the free Sunday Basket Club that's included as part of the Sunday Basket. Each week, and you're able to do it with the community and learn it. So you're not doing it all on your own, you just do it with us. And then there is the third learner, and this is the learner that I have always specialized in when I was a teacher and for my kids. And that is the student who recognizes that they want the knowledge, they can even go and find the knowledge, and they can even buy the system or whatever it is, but they really learn best best when it is explained one-on-one or in a small group where they can, you know, open up the Sunday basket, get all their supplies out, and then instead of reading the directions or going through the videos and learning based on the teacher's pace and the teacher's order of instruction, they do much better when either a teacher next to them could say, okay, guide them and say, okay, get out your pink slash pockets, okay, we're going to do this, and then they do this, okay, now get out your purple and do this, and then they do this, and they like the the chunking it, that the teacher can do in real time so that they don't get overwhelmed or sidetracked by how much there is to do, or they can say, "I know the system, I know you start with pink, but I really want to start with green." And then the teacher will say, in this small group or one-on-one instruction, "Great, okay, then let's start with green." And then you're able to go out of order because you have a physical person there that is still going to make sure that you get through the whole system And while you're doing it, you could say, okay, I know that the model said that this would be the label, but here's my unique situation. Here's how I want to use it. How would you modify that for me? And so that's the third kind of learner who either learns better in the one-on-one situation or small group instruction, wants to go out of order, or also just wants to get it done much faster. Like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I want the expert here. I want to get this whole thing set up this weekend. "so I could just hit the ground running next week. I don't have like 6 weeks to figure this all out on my own. Like, can you speed up the process for me?" So because I understand there is a large population of people who learn best by having either a one-on-one or a small group instruction, I created the Paper Certification Program before we even had paper products because I knew I would need other certified organizers who understood how to organize the Organized 365 way if I was going to teach people how to organize this way, because I, I knew quickly I would not be able to be the person that was able to do that. And so that's what the Sunday Basket certification is. So the Sunday Basket certification program is professional organizers and other people who just love Organized 365 and have figured out the Sunday Basket and want to do that small group instruction but not do anything else. In the professional organization realm, or they're adding it on to their— I mean, we have, we have doctors, we have psychiatrists, we have therapists, we have so many different people who are like, my, my clients need the Sunday Basket and they need this other service I have to offer. So they're not necessarily in-home professional organizers. There are two different certifications that are related to the in-home paper. Solution. One is the Sunday Basket certification where you can find a Sunday Basket organizer that will go through your Sunday Basket with you one-on-one or in a small group. And those are usually 90-minute sessions, 60 to 90 minutes, 60 minutes if it's one-on-one, I think 90 minutes if it's in a small group. And then there are paper organizers that will do paper organizing retreats. And all the way back 25 years ago, I did these scrapbooking retreats and paper that's in your filing cabinet is just big versions of the photos that I used to help people organize. And because remember I told you paper is portable, I took it to the pool. You can literally box up your paper and take it to a paper organizing retreat and organize it that way. We've done many of these in Cincinnati and certified organizers do them all over the United States. There are two different ways that you could do paper organizing retreats. One, because of COVID we now have 4 to 6 hour virtual paper organizing retreats that are on Zoom, which frankly, I did not know that would be how popular and easy that would be. And actually it's great because then you don't even have to take your paper anywhere. If you run out of paper, you can just get more out of wherever you store all of your unsorted paper, or it, you don't have to guess how much you're gonna get through in each of the virtual paper organizing retreats. And then we do have certified organizers that are doing in-person paper organizing retreats. And those are usually 2 days with a night in there. You start on a Saturday morning usually, and you go until Sunday afternoon. And that gives you a really long period of time uninterrupted, not at home to focus and get through a lot of organization. So to sum all of this up, paper for Americans, it's here to stay. And the paper solution will help you get through the backlog, separate out your paper from actionable and archival paper, and then has solutions for both. And the truth of the matter is you're going to spend the time organizing this paper either now or when you're in an emergency situation. And if you have not lost a loved one yet where you were in charge of the finances and the estate and their healthcare, you probably will be in this situation at some time. And when you're going through someone else's paper that you don't know, you'll see what a blessing it is when you go through your own paper and get it organized so that there is less there when your loved ones are, uh, going through your own paperwork. And then the third thing I wanna leave you with this encouragement is that once you learn the skill of organizing paper, you can maintain these systems fairly easily. Like when you get your entire home organized, you can definitely maintain that for anywhere from 5 to 10 years unless you have a large unexpected event. Like our houses tend to get away from us whenever we run out of time. But once you actually set up these paper systems, they may get away from you, but you'll be able to get them back into line usually with one day, whereas your home is going to take a little bit longer and you'll have different phases of life. So once you make this time investment, it's going to last. In the next episode, I'm going to do the next glossary and we're going to talk about these 4 essential binders. What's in them? How do you make them? And how can they really benefit you? Thanks for listening to this Organize 365 playlist. You can find more information about these podcast episodes at organize365.com/glossary. I invite you to dive deeper into your organization