Tidy Mom Camp - Day 5 The Paper piles!

Hi, everyone. We made it to day five, and I'm so excited to be talking to you about paper. This is a very highly requested video and topic that a lot of people need help with, and I love working on this. I find working through paper clutter with people so satisfying because it feels so good when you're done. And if you put the right systems in place, you can manage it going forward and you no longer have the headache of piles of paperwork. So. So I'm going to split this video up into two sections. The first section will be just paper clutter in general, and then the second section will be about kids, schoolwork, and artwork. So let's dive in. Okay. When it comes to just general paperwork, I suggest you gather paper from all around your house, get it all together, wherever your staging area is going to be, and just be okay with the fact it's going to be a mess for a while. But gather everything up. Grab papers from your office, your bedroom, your car, your garage, your kitchen counter, kitchen table, any, anywhere that you have papers that are not organized, gather them up, put them in a pile. That's the first place to start. Okay, now you want to get three bins. And I suggest if you have a lot of papers, get three very large bins or boxes. And you can also use paper bags or plastic bags if you want as well. And label one, Recycle, label one, shred and label the third one. Take action and then. And I'll explain what those three are for. The recycle one is obvious. I think if you have recycle available to you in your area, this would be anything that you don't want to keep and doesn't have any personal information on it. The shred should be anything that you want to shred. Anything that has personal information on, I recommend shredding. And you can do one of two things. You can shred it yourself if you have a shredder. Or there's a lot of places you can take your stuff and securely have it shredded for you, like at office stores and other facilities. And the third bin is the one where you need to take action. And this will be anything that you need to do, whether it's a permission slip for your kid, it's a medical bill that you need to pay, it's some lab results that you want to keep, it's a magazine you want to read, or anything that you need to take action and do something with will go into the take action bin. Okay. I do want to note that I can't give advice on which documents to keep and which ones to get rid of. But I do suggest there's great resources online. If you Google document retention strategies or how long do I keep my documents? You will find a lot of great. Whether you want to get government sites or other security company site information on how long you should keep your tax records, how long you should keep medical bills, how long should you keep? Like just say your PGE bill that you paid, whatever it is. If you search online, you'll get great resources and they generally comply and they're usually about the same with very little subtle differences. But that's the best way to find out how long you should keep certain documents. Okay, here's a strategy that I want you to use to go through this pile. Okay, first thing is pick up a piece of paper, look at the piece of paper and decide, do you recycle it? Do you shred it? And if it's not one of those two things, put it in the take action bin. You want to make quick decisions. You want to pick up a piece of paper, look at it, and put it in one of the three bins. And if you don't know for sure, just put it in the take action bin, go through your entire pile and and use that strategy, quick touch and quick decisions and go through the whole pile until there's no more documents left to go through. Okay, I recommend going through your take action bin one more time to make sure you didn't miss anything. So grab anything that can go straight to recycle or straight to shred. Once you've done that next pass, let's go on to the next step. Okay, you can go ahead and throw anything that you need to recycle away and empty that bin, but keep it because you're probably still going to need it. And then if you have stuff to shred and you have your own shredder, go ahead and shred it and then dispose of it. If you're going to take it off site, then just leave it in the shred bin and let's go on to the next step. Okay, now we need to create two places for paperwork to be stored. The first one is a large bin and it's for anything incoming when it comes in the house. It'll just go straight into that bin and just call it incoming paperwork or whatever you want to call it. And basically the purpose of it is, is to ensure that anything coming in the house, if it's not filed or put away or dealt with, that it goes into this bin and you need to establish a process for going through it and taking care of things. So I suggest you get a large bin. A nice vertical bin works really well, but you can have a flat one that sits on a table or in a shelf, wherever you want to have it. And then make sure and establish a system. I suggest you do this weekly, that you go through this bin and you take care of anything that's inside this bin. And that way you ensure that you're going through your paperwork on a regular basis. This should stop any paperwork from ending up on your kitchen table, sitting around in your entryway, sitting on your kitchen counter, because paper will go straight into this bin and you're going through this bin on a weekly basis. Okay, the second thing you need to create is like an inbox, like a, like a To do folder or a to do bin so that when you do have something like a bill that needs to be paid or some test results you want to go through, or something you need to give to somebody else, you can put it in your to do folder or your to do bin and make sure you get to that on a regular basis because you don't want this to pile up. And if you purposely get something small like this, it'll make sure that you go through it on a regular basis. Again, I would do this at least weekly. Okay, now by doing that, you'll help ensure that there's no new clutter that should start piling up around your house. So, okay, now what you want to do is create some form of long term paper storage, right? So you want to get a file cabinet, you want to get some sort of bins, you can get something that goes behind your office door that hangs on it. Anything that you want to do where you can use it as long term file storage. So if you need to keep medical documents, birth certificates, car titles, anything like that, you need to make sure you have some sort of permanent storage that you can put those documents in to save for long term. Okay, now's the fun part. Now's the time you go through that Take Action bin. And I hope it's just a fraction of what your piles were originally, but don't be afraid of it. Just take it one thing at a time. Go through, grab a piece of paper and decide what you need to do. If it's something you can put in your long term storage, put it there. If it's something that you need to take action on, put it in your to do folder. And you need to go through this process for every single piece of Paper. If you get stuck, put it at the bottom of the pile and just keep going through this pile, you know, one at a time, and eventually you'll work your way through it. Okay. When it comes to kids artwork and schoolwork, I know there's a lot of emotion sometimes with it and a lot of sentimental items. So let's go through the process. That definitely works for me and I've worked with others and I think it'll work for you. So the first thing to do is make sure you have one place where all the paperwork comes when it comes home from school. So whether it comes out of their backpack, you know, book B or it gets handed directly to you, you need to make sure that either you have the responsibility or your child to take everything and put it into one common place that both of you have access to. So it's a box, a bin, anything, a shelf, anything that you have where everything can go. So there's one place it doesn't go anywhere else in your house. It doesn't go on the counters, the landing zone, your dining room table, or anything. So make sure that you and your child both understand where things go, no matter what it is coming from school. Now, you also need to create a place to display some of their stuff. So if they have like a great project that they did, or a piece of paper they're really proud of, or some artwork, make sure you're displaying it. So create a gallery wall or put it on your refrigerator somewhere so that you can definitely, you know, show them that you're proud and they can be proud of their work as well. Now the next thing to do is decide on long term storage. Where do you want to store all of their stuff? I store my dog, all of my kids, they all have a hanging fold, one per year. I eventually, as they got older, consolidated down, but they each had one. So I'd have kindergarten, I would have first grade, second grade, third grade. Right. Per kid. And it was just an easy way of storing all of the things that came home from school that I wanted to keep after I went through them. So whether you use a hanging folder, whether you use some sort of art portfolio, these are really nice because it keeps it contained and you can, it'll help ensure that things that are kind of larger will fit in here. This is really nice, but you can use anything you want. You can use a plastic bin. They have stacking plastic bins, but one per kid, one per year. So now that you have all of that set up and established, you want to now Come up with a process for how you're going to go through all the paperwork that's in your school paper inbox, the one that, you know you and your kid are putting things in straight as you come in the door and you are emptying out that backpack and putting it in there. You need to come up with a process for when you're going to go through that again. I suggest every couple days or once a week. And then now we need to decide what you want to keep and why you want to keep things. Okay, now it's time to decide who you're keeping this paperwork for. All the school items. Are you keeping it for you? Are you keeping it for your child? Do you want to give it to them later? Or, you know, the other thing you may want to consider is this school artwork and projects make great gifts. So if they come home with something they made by hand, it's some sort of like sculptured item or something like that, or even paperwork and drawings. Aunts, uncles, grandparents would love to have this type of gift from your child. So if it's a birthday coming up, you know, look at this stash of things that they've brought home and consider giving this as a gift. It's. It would make that, it would make their day and your child would be so proud. So make sure you understand what you're keeping things for and who you're keeping things for. That's important to decide up front. Now the second thing is who has a say in what gets kept. Are you the decision maker? Is it your child or is it going to be both of you? And there's no right or wrong answer. I never involved my kids with it, but I know a lot of people that do. And it, you know what, it is a nice thing for them to learn how to make these decisions and for them to be involved. So think about that now and you can make your own decision on what works for you. Now you need to decide what type of things you want to keep. So here's a list that I have. You can keep report cards, handwritten papers, artwork, anything that talks about them in their current stage. So what their favorite color is, what their favorite vacation is, or their favorite animal. They have the cutest thing things and it's always great to look back on those. Anything personal like a, a poem again, a favorite vacation. Maybe keep some of their tests or handwriting samples, anything performance related, something funny or certificates. Right, Anything like that. Those are great things to keep. Now what you need to do is set limits. How much of Each item do you want to keep? Again, you don't want to end up with a ton of things by the time they're done with school because they're not going to want it. And I'm not sure what you're going to do with it either. So make sure you're really clear up front. How much of each item do you wanna keep throughout each school year? Okay, so you've established a place for incoming paperwork to come home, where it goes straight to there, it doesn't go in the kitchen, anywhere else. So that you have that you've decided on long term storage solution, on what you're going to do, one per kid per year. So whatever you decide to do, to store it. And then now you made a commitment to look through your school paper inbox that you and your child are putting papers in. Whether you do that every day, every other or once a week, you've made a commitment to do that. You're pulling out anything that's timely, it needs to be attended to. Again, field trip items, anything like that that goes in your to do bin, in your command center. Then you're going through and based on what you've decided to keep and whoever's making the decisions, you go through and you keep certain things and then you get rid of the rest. And once you go through this process and you'll have an eye for what you want to keep and what you don't need to keep. But you can always change it if you find a bunch of things later that you want to keep. You can always go back in your long thing and maybe swap some things out. So you know, I like to err and be a little bit cautious and keep a little bit extra, but you don't want to go overboard. So now you have that process, you should have a good feel for how to stay on top of this. And you know, it should be something you now enjoy because you also have your kids artwork on display and they're super proud of it. And don't forget about my suggestion to give them as gifts. The last thing I'll suggest for you, I like to pull out the kids holiday themed things and like here's some Christmas stuff. I like to put these and store these with my decorations and I like to pull them out and display them during the holidays. It's fun. The kids get a kick out of them now that they're older. So that's another fun thing to do. So if you are 100% dedicated to this process, you'll have two things happen one, you'll work through the backlog of all the papers that you have around your house. And two, you'll have a a really good system for managing paperwork going forward. I wish you all the luck. And if you have any questions or you need help, please reach out to me in the Facebook group. I'd love to help brainstorm any solutions you need. And like I said, I've gone through this with people and I absolutely love it because it's so satisfying. When you're done, I can't wait for you to get this off your shoulders and literally off your counter so you no longer have to deal with it.