It is far too easy to let loose paper, documents, and receipts build up at home, ultimately increasing the amount of clutter. Fortunately, there are several good ways to control paper clutter as well as reduce the amount of documents that might begin to pile up.
It will take some hard work if the clutter is already out of control to begin with in your house. Once the hard part of organizing is over with, regular organizational maintenance for some will still require persistent vigilance to prevent the paper clutter from creeping back in.
4 Tips to Help Control Paper Clutter At Home
1. Decide How You Want To Store Your Documents
Everyone has their own preferred system for filing and organizing. You might want to use plastic bins, or you may decide that a metal filing cabinet will do the trick. As long as you have a system for how you are going to store the paper documents so that they are no longer cluttering up surfaces and areas of the house, the mess will easily become organized and under control.
2. Separate the paper into categories
It does not make much sense to put receipts together in a pile with recipes. In order to control paper clutter most efficiently, you should try to store any similar documents together and label what type of papers they are somewhere on their storage bins. That way, when you need to look through old bills or statements, you will know exactly in which folder you should be browsing through. Your system can be whatever works best for you. As long as every page has a place to go and you can easily find it, your system should work.
3. Shred Papers That You Don’ Need
If there are any loose pages that you discover during the organizing process that you no longer need, you should probably shred them and get rid of these papers. It doesn’t make sense to take up valuable storage space for pages that you didn’t need to keep around in the first place. It might also make it harder for you to find the important pages in amongst the less useful ones. Sort through your papers and decide what papers are important for you to keep and destroy the rest.
4. Start Organizing On A Room By Room Basis
Sometimes, depending on how much clutter has already begun to build up, it might feel overwhelming to try to tackle the entire house all at once. Sometimes if you start with one room, it makes the entire thing less stressful and overwhelming. If the task is broken up into manageable chunks, the process of organizing the paper clutter becomes a lot easier to deal with. Start with whatever room is the most troublesome and begin organizing papers you find one room at a time.
Once all of the paper clutter is put away and organized, it is very important to form a habit of always putting away loose pages into the proper storage bins immediately. If you simply leave them all out around the house again, they will only start to pile up, landing you with the problem you had right before you started. With clutter.
Make a point of always having somewhere to store the paper documents you accumulate that you still feel a need to keep around. Start a household practice of not letting loose pages pile up around you. This requires everyone in the house to cooperate so that the paper clutter will always remain under control.
I like to put paper away right away so it does not build up
Great tips, I sort out paper which can go into the recycle bin and others that need to be shredded. Our town has a program where twice a year you can drop off your papers that need to be shredded and they have the big shedding truck there to shed all your papers.
Great tips!
Thanks for the great tips! I always battle the paper piles.