2684 Taking Control

Friday, December 4, 2009

“…those who wrestle with something and come out on top
tend to have a better understanding of that something
than those who merely submit to it.”

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I never thought about how I file receipts and other papers. I just did it the way I'd been taught - a folder for phone, one for electric service, one for garbage, one for each credit card, one for each insurance policy, one for each car, one for each year's taxes, one for each company's stock, and so on. At last count there were well over 150 carefully labeled folders.

I ended up with two 40" x 29" file cabinets, with a mountain of "to be filed" paper on top, three years' worth right now. If I ever had to locate anything, I couldn't find it in the cabinets, but had relatively no difficulty finding it in the "TBF" pile. Another observation - I seldom had to look for anything. (That's not a reason not to keep paper. The few times I did have to find something, it was critical, and you never know what that something might be.)

Really, I should have thought about why I don't file papers. It's all the examining, sorting, deciding, finding the folders, reaching, ... eh. Every piece of paper required special handling.

Today I started a reorganization. ALL bills that are paid regularly are in one hanging folder, one for each of the last seven years. ALL papers having anything whatsoever to do with the cars are in one folder, except for the car insurance, which is in the one folder containing ALL papers having to do with any insurance, whether house, car, health, life. ALL receipts for one-time purchases and their warranties if any are in one folder. And so on. I'm down to perhaps 12 folders total, many of which will be seldom touched.

Of course, "one folder" might actually be several consecutive hanging folders with one label, just because of quantity. The point is that I'm not sorting beyond the highest level.

I hadn't filed paper in three years because I knew it would take an hour just to file one month's paper, and would leave me with a sore back. With the new scheme, I filed three years of paper just this afternoon, and because all I had to do was sit on the floor and make a few piles, each of which required only one trip to the cabinet, it didn't hurt at all.

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The Wikipedia folks are a non-profit group, and they're currently running a fund drive. They don't inundate us with ads, for which we should be grateful. Yeah, I know that not everything on Wikipedia is completely accurate, given that anyone can say anything (I find that wikifools are not suffered lightly), but I use it a lot - every time someone mentions an unfamiliar person, plant, place, or event I look it up on Wikipedia, and at least I have a starting point.

I made a small contribution. If you use Wikipedia too, how 'bout giving them a dime for every time you've used them in the past year?

Gotta run now. Dinner at a Thai restaurant in Albany this evening.
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