Every house has a pile of paper that is not quite rubbish and not quite filed. The trouble is never the amount of it. It is that there is no one place it goes, so it goes everywhere. This letter is about the two or three places that do the work, and the habit that keeps them working.
One tray by the door, and the habit of emptying it.
Paper comes into a house in one place and lands in six. So give it a tray, next to the door most of it arrives by, and let nothing else live in that tray. Then empty it on a day of your own choosing, with the tray in front of you rather than in a pile you can walk past. Five minutes at a time is the whole job. A pile you can walk past is a pile that gets moved rather than sorted.
Keep it, act on it, or let it go.
Every piece in that tray gets one of three answers, and the answer is allowed to be quick. Keep it, because you might have to produce it one day. Act on it now, because somebody is waiting for it. Or let it go, because you would not miss it. The test for keeping is not whether it is interesting. It is whether you could put your hands on it if you needed it, a year from now. If you could get it again in two minutes, you do not need the paper version.
The drawer of manuals and warranties.
One drawer, one folder, and everything in it. Write the date you bought the thing on the front of its manual, because that is usually the date the warranty runs from, and keep the receipt in with it. If the manual is only online, a card in the folder saying where it is does the same job. Then when something fails, you are looking in one place instead of four, and you already know the date.
The box that holds a year.
Receipts, statements and the papers you might one day have to produce go into one box with one label on it. The box gets closed when it is full, however long that takes, rather than on any particular date, so going through it is a job with an end instead of a habit. Keep a paper copy of the few things you would hate to have only on a screen, and know where that copy is. The rest of the paper in a house can go, but only if it is not something you would have to produce.
That is the letter. The printable packs are at darpetshop.com.
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