Neat or Messy?

I'm not an Either-Or girl; I'm an And/And girl. So YES, as best suits my time, my resources, and my situation.

I think my BEST organizing trick is to never organize papers that are in current use except to binderize them when they get bulky enough to need something to keep them together, like I just binderized our insurance matters. Till that time comes, it's mere pile-making time.

For most of the paper that accumulates, I have learned that I will actually not know how I should organize them (what to keep/pitch), till long after.

So I have a box-of-the-year out back in our storage area waiting to catch, at all times. As the house looks too messy, and as I finish projects that use those piles, I take the paper piles out there. They accumulate out there in a simple reverse-chronological order, most recent on top.

When THAT pile is box-ful sized, I'll organize/purge all of that, label the box with the time span and subjects covered, and add it to the pile of labeled file boxes. I will NOT worry about how much more to organize it, till we move again. At that time I will go through all the year-boxes created since the last move, organize/purge them down to a smaller number, and take them along.

I use that old stuff more frequently that I might have predicted, as old projects become new "work-product" samples for positions I'm interested in or new projects I take on. It isn't used often enough to warrant a full court press on filing, but it IS used often enough to hang onto it. The oldest ones are the most-purged, by now, but I have a hardcopy of everything I've ever created and every resource I've ever liked; I purge the older ones when we move, once we unpack, as a rainy-day project. I've been know to hire a teen helper to tote purged items to the trash heap and to carry the boxes to quick-sort, re-label, and re-stack.

Newest boxes are on top; the boxes are stacked in rows I can access so that at no time do I need to get a box out from under more boxes than I can manage to move, by myself. The stacks are tidy; they look like rows of file cabinets. Boxes of books resourcing those time periods' interests are in there, too, once they are no longer needed in my "current" library.

I purge the digital media of it as time and media change-- the DOS digital files are gone for example, but the hardcopy remains, scannable for text. Next time we move, Windows 3.1 files on floppies will go-- I already copied forward anything really important onto the hard disk and that's backed up too.

And I always know where to immediately grab for whatever I was most recently working on, in case we have a fire or something (as we did once).

~Susan