Filing Electronically
For most of our married life, we’ve had a filing cabinet, which used to fill up more year by year. Several years ago a friend of ours tried to convince us to ditch it and go completely electronic. We were initially skeptical – mostly because we just couldn’t face the prospect of sorting through that much paperwork!
But finally, about a year ago when we were considering how to declutter our house for sale we came to the conclusion that removing the filing cabinet would really help. So started the process of filtering ALL the collected paper debris from the last 14 years. It wasn’t much fun, but in the end, it was worth it.
Scott and I worked together on the task (thankfully). We had 3 outcomes for any filing cabinet item. It was either:
- chucked in the recycling bin (e.g. old receipts or bank records)
- scanned to save an electronic copy (e.g. important receipts, mortgage documents, sentimental stuff like wedding invitations) OR
- Kept in a very small plastic file box (only very important documents like passports, birth certificates etc)
Now when we receive mail, receipts or documents they straight away get scanned or binned, so as to minimise excess clutter. It’s fantastic! But it did take a LOT of work, patience and discipline to set up. Even now I’m still working my way through a box of random articles or recipes I once saved from old Treasures magazines and have never looked at since – I can’t quite bring myself to just dump the lot!
Filing electronically has been great for bringing increased order to our home. To my mind, anything that helps towards increased orderliness and decreased clutter is something worth considering!
