Filing, Redux

Perhaps it's the historian in me, but I've always had a hard time getting rid of paper. For years, I moved dozens of boxes of paper, some organized, some not, from one home to another. Eventually, I got the 'important' stuff into a two drawer filing cabinet, then, when I got room for one, I acquired an additional four drawer cabinet. Finally, for the first time in over five years, I went through my dozens of boxes and organized them.

Time passed and I began my purging journey and I started to go through all that paper that had once seemed so vitally important. Dozens of boxes became six and then three; two stored in a filing cabinet, one consisting of 'archives.'.

Today, I took the final plunge. Could I get my files down to one box? Could I give up my filing cabinet?

At Wal-mart on Friday, they happened to have the RubberMaid file totes on sale for a good discount. I picked one up.

This morning, I migrated my files from the filing cabinet to the box. Needless to say, I had way too many for the space. I was down to the crunch; what was I keeping just because I had room for it? The first obvious answer was tax records. Did I really want to die like my dad, having dragged forty years worth of tax records (no joke) through dozens of moves? Erm, no. So, I counted back seven years (not counting 2008) and shredded my 2000 and past records. I also shredded all my pay slips for the current years. Then, I went through my instruction manual/warranty folders and got rid of the paperwork for things I don't have any more and/or for which warranties have expired. I filled my shredder bucket twice today.

I'm not quite done yet as I still have some files to create, but I'm calling this project a success.



The box is full, you say? Nope, there's still a full quarter of a box left!

The next project that I am contemplating is moving my DVDs to a binder system. I'm not sure I'll want to invest in that at this time. Right now, they're well organized in the Ikea boxes, so the binder project will probably wait until I have a better idea of how much/little space I'll have in my RV.