Dealing with paper clutter

 

Do you ever deal with paper clutter at your house? We do too. But we have some ways of dealing with it that work pretty good for us. Perhaps they will help you too.

 

  Paper clutter has many different ways of entering our homes, It might be mail (good or junk), magazines, church papers, newspapers, Children's school papers, artwork, instructions, patterns and on and on!

 

 Something that I think we have worked towards (and I think we are improving in) is to deal with the paper clutter right away. For instance, you bring the mail in the house, look through it and then what? Don't lay it down again and stack it somewhere so you have to go through it another day (at least not all of it!) but rather quickly through the junk mail (which is most of it) into the recycling and then figure out what should be done with the rest. If there is a magazine to be read later than put it directly in the magazine rack, if it is a bill that needs paid than we have a spot on Ken's desk for letters like that or any other letters that have to do with finances and such. They are kept neatly together until the day that he works on that. If it is a personal letter that you want to reply to then put it with your letter writing stuff. Those are some of the ways that we deal with mail that comes into our home.

 

  Children's papers - those can add up very quickly can't they?! We have to keep some school papers in case we would ever be check up on (in our homeschooling) and those I keep on our homeschooling shelf, but when it is not necessary I will quickly recycle them unless they are something that I don't want to forget in which case I then file them in a file for that child.

 

 With artwork we have a special wall on which to display it and then when that gets full we will sometimes send some away to relatives or use it for wrapping paper or something like that and some really good art I will file away.

 For things that you do need to keep it is a great idea to have a file cabinet that is well organized and easy to use. It will make filing easy and fun and will help you to keep your home much neater and more organized.

  Ken has file cabinets by his desk for our "important" papers and I have one in my craft room for my more fun stuff. By they way I found my file cabinet for free on the curb one day. They can at times be pretty easy to come by and they are certainly a great tool!

  Do you use a file cabinet? How do you deal with paper clutter?