“Put your physical mailbox on a diet by reducing the amount of uninvited mail entering your home,” says Debra Baida of Liberated Spaces. You should also consider opting out of all the unwanted junk mail clogging up your mailbox. Your bills will now land in your email, and the pile of mail on your countertop will decrease. One easy way to do this is to switch all of your communications with banks and insurance companies to paperless. Claim home Switch all of your communications with banks and insurance companies to paperless.Īnother key way to keep your paper clutter in check is to manage the paper arriving by snail mail every day. Go paperless and opt outĬlaim your home to stay up-to-date of your home‘s value and equity. This will help keep your home free of clutter and make your files easier to find when you need them most. Once you convert your original documents to digital files, save them under labels you’ll be able to find later. Dropbox and Google Drive offer cloud storage, which is great for photos and large files.” “Apple Wallet and Files are great for storing documents you’ll need at your fingertips, from travel documents to event tickets. “There are so many apps to help with paperwork going digital,” says Molly Govus of Beespoked. Use a scanner to save a digital copy of the paper on your computer, or snap a photo of the document on your phone. Once you have some piles of things you intend to keep, it’s time to consider if you can digitize those items and throw away the originals. Would you reference this piece of paper again? Is it available in some other format (digitally or at the library)? Are there legal or medical reasons to keep it? Go digital Use a scanner to save a digital copy of the paper on your computer, or snap a photo of the document on your phone. If you’re having a hard time deciding what’s truly essential and what isn’t, professional organizer Amy Trager suggests you ask yourself these questions. These essential documents will include items like contracts, medical records, paperwork for taxes, and any official or government-issued documents like birth certificates, passports, and wills. Your essential documents will be part of the “to file” stack, and you’ll want to store them somewhere safe. Then, when you have time, you can tackle each stack of papers and take the appropriate action. “Do a first pass of paperwork to decide what’s truly trash and which items require some sort of action,” says Rebecka Jodeit of Graceful Spaces Organizing.įrom there, grab the stack of papers that require action and sort them into the following categories: to pay, to keep in sight, to file. This first tip might seem obvious, but it needs to be said: You need to make this overwhelming process seem a bit less so, and the best way to do that is to organize your multitude of papers into functional piles. First things first: Sort the papers The best start to decluttering papers is to sort them into functional piles.
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