The Lazy Genius Podcast - #91 - The Lazy Genius Organizes Paper

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

Have you ever noticed paper is like a magnet? The more you have laying around the more it attracts. In this week’s episode, I tackle the three biggest problems we have with paper and give you an inside look at how I lazy genius my paper situation at home.   Helpful Companion Links Download my super helpful eBook The Swap all month long to help you make a clear path through your stuff. If you have questions about The Swap, feel free to DM me on Instagram or shoot me a quick email at [e-mail]. Here’s a similar basket option to the one that contains the kids’ art that lives near the art supplies. Join the conversation over at The Lazy Genius Collective Facebook group. Download a transcript of this episode. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents. Under the hood, the available 201 turbocharged horsepower engine gives it a fun to drive edge. The refined Tiguan, you deserve more style. Visit vw.ca to learn more. SuvW, German engineered for all. You're listening to the lazy genius podcast. I'm Kendra, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about things that don't. Today is episode 91. The lazy genius organizes paper. This might be one of the most requested topics in the history of topic requesting. Everybody wants to know what's do with bills and school flyers and art projects and all the paper that threatens to drown us in sadness. So let's lazy genius up in this episode, y'all. But first,

I want to let you know that if you're drowning, not just in paper, but in your stuff, my small but mighty, super helpful ebook, The Swap, is available this month only in January. It offers a clear path through your stuff and it helps you learn to declutter for life. There are so many amazing decluttering resources out there and a ton of them are so good and very helpful for you, I'm sure. They just might be too long or involved for the time that you have right now. The swap is as much of a quick fix as you can get with results that are going to last. If you are already like fairly organized with your stuff, you don't feel the need to burn your house down and start over, you're probably all set.

You don't need to get it. But if you need a little direction and how to decide what to get rid of without having to like hold every single item, what to do with the piles, even how to stop, stop accumulating the piles in the first place, the swap could be a lovely companion to your January. And because you just spent a million dollars last month on holiday stuff, I get the tension of spending more now on something that might not work. I get it. Can I read you some bits of an email from someone who has used this swap? And maybe it'll help.

So this is from Eliana. She says, I own more books than I care to admit on organization and minimalism and decluttering. And not one of them has had the impact that your short PDF file has. The other systems are too complicated, require you to pull everything out of the room, or just are way too overwhelming to contemplate starting. I read through your instructions very late one night as I was beyond desperate to get our house back to a place of peace and order, a home where we wanted to hang out and a place we felt

comfortable inviting friends to. The next morning, I broached the subject with our seven children and my husband about transforming our lounge room into a haven. We chatted for nearly an hour on each person's view of what would make the ideal room, how we could achieve it and what we would willingly give up to make it happen. Something I'd been dreading for years only took four hours. Thank you for describing such a sensible, doable, and uncomplicated system that really works. Thank you so much for that kind email, Eliana.

And I hope that those of you who are listening might get a little encouragement if you're on the fence about the swap. Yes, I want to sell it to you because it's my job. But I really want you to have it so you can change how you live. I think it's going to help you. The hunt just might be over. So check out the link in the show notes if you want to check out the swap. Again, it is available through the end of January just for this month. And if you have any questions, you can always DM me on Instagram at the lazy genius or send me an email at Kendra at the lazy genius collective.com.

Okay, let's get into organizing paper. All right, here we go. The three biggest problems with paper. Number one, there's too much of it. Number two, we don't know what to keep. And number three, we don't know where to put what we keep. So let's tackle those three problems one at a time. Remember that being a lazy genius is being a genius about the things that matter and lazy

about the things that don't. This is when you get to decide what matters to you when it comes to paper. If organization doesn't matter, but just having like a catch-all spot does, don't stress about perfect organization. If your kid's creativity matters, but the nostalgia of keeping everything they make doesn't, don't keep everything they make. If the planet matters to you, but you also forget to pay your bills if they come to your inbox rather than your mailbox, don't do emailed bills. Think for a minute about what actually matters.

Easy access, systems, good records, something easy enough that your family members can jump on board. You need to decide what matters and what doesn't as we talk and it will help. Okay, so the first problem. There's too much paper. This is obvious and also the worst. Paper comes in from everywhere, mostly way out of our control. I cannot tell my kids' teachers to not send home flyers, but oh my word, please don't send home any more flyers. The main culprit of feeling the pain of too much paper is letting it accumulate. Paper is like a magnet.

It attracts itself to itself. If you put down a small pile of mail on the counter and you don't do anything with it right away, before you know it, you have two weeks worth of mail on the counter and you hate everything. just grows like a fungus, like a stupid paper fungus. So your best bet in dulling the pain of too much paper is not letting it accumulate. So how do you do that? This takes us into problem number two. Problem number two is that you don't know what to keep. So if step one is to not let paper accumulate, step two is to decide now what to keep and what to toss. Decide now. Think about paper categories. catalogs, bills, notices of like social stuff, you know, like birthday invitations and stuff,

flyers from your kids' school, art projects from your tiny little picas, cards and notes, like handwritten for those rare snail mail communications. There's a chance you have a pile or two of paper in your house right now that's taunting you. So just go grab it and look at the categories if it will help. What types of paper do you not have time for? In theory, I like the idea of looking through that giant IKEA catalog, but it's never important enough to actually do. And yet it stays on the counter forever because I think that maybe I'll eventually look through it. I won't. Now, you could go online and unsubscribe from all the things that you really don't have time for, but I think even if you do that, Garnet Hill will still find a way to send me a catalog. Like,

that they just do it is what it is so look at the categories of paper that typically enter your house and decide if any of those categories like on the whole can kind of get the boot of course you might keep some of your catalogs but the rule is to kind of immediately toss them not the other way around not to keep them and then decide okay so there are also like kinds of paper where you need the information but not the actual paper Fliars are the perfect example of this. So as you're deciding what to keep, maybe one of your decisions that you make one time, you've eliminated a category maybe. Here's another decision you can make one time is if I just need one piece of information and I don't need the entire

paper, where do I put this information? There are obviously flyers that are good to keep. A baby shower birthday party invitation is a great example. You kind of, you need the address, the date, the time, where the person's registered, all of that stuff. But, if it's like a PTA meeting and all you need to know is the date and the time, just write that in your calendar and then toss the paper. So if you just need one piece of information, log the information, toss the paper. There are a million examples of how to see this step because we all get different kinds of paper and have different priorities for it. The biggest trick is to decide now what you'll do later as much as you can. Decide that when you walk in the house with a handful of mail and papers from your

kids that you immediately recycle what you don't want to keep, don't let it accumulate. Then you have a much smaller pile of what you will keep, which leads us to the third problem with paper. What do you do with what you keep? You can do a number of different things here too, but I'm going to give you one strategy that might just be the thing that turns this paper organizing thing on its head. Have one holding place for most papers and deal with them later. I know. That doesn't sound very organized and I just told you to deal with stuff now, but hear me out. One of the hardest things about being a person is making so many dang decisions all the time. I love making one decision ahead of time so I don't have to keep making the same decision every day.

A Monday uniform is a good example of this or the same thing every Monday so that I don't have to think about it. I meal plan so that when it's 4 o'clock, I don't have to think about what's for dinner. I mean, as much. I still have to cook, but like I don't have to decide what to cook. knowing what you're going to keep and toss when it comes to paper is a decision you can make once and never again. But when it comes to deciding what to do with what you keep, I think it's good to actually put off the decision, except for bills, pay your bills. I'm going to, you need to pay your bills. But I'm going to tell you how to organize your paper to give you an idea of how this works, what I mean by this. Okay. So I have five main holding spaces for paper. I'll explain those and what goes in them

in the process and all that. The first place paper might go is in a little shelf in my kitchen by the keys and the coats. When I bring in mail or I get that fistful of papers from school, I toss what doesn't matter immediately. And then the rest probably goes on that little shelf. Aw, isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting for us in everyday life, whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dr. Keltner, host of the Science of happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw, a special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Now, here's where you need to be careful with that, like initial catch-all spot for paper.

It needs to only have what you plan on keeping, not what you might not. It just causes more accumulation and you can so easily lose a power bill in between those those garnet hill catalogs. So really the first holding place in some ways is the recycling bin, but after that only put things that you plan on keeping in that initial spot in that initial holding place, probably by the door where you come in. And here's the thing. You can leave it there, but you also need to make a decision to go through it at a regular interval and not realize it, realize that you forgot about it until you like didn't pay your

target credit card bill and it gets rejected out of the store. So we don't want that to happen either. I go through my little catch-all every other Friday. So every two weeks. That way, I'm never laid on a bill. I used to do it once a month and sometimes I'd miss a bill and that's not great. So every two weeks works great for me. That way I'm not needing to deal with stuff every day. I can save the decision making for one single day every couple of weeks. Okay, now what about the stuff that's more time sensitive and needs to happen before two weeks? You put it in your planner or you put it on my favorite urgent spot, the front of the fridge. I have magnets that look like chip clips where I can clip up important papers.

Usually things related to my kids' schools, so they stay kind of front of mind, like permission slips for field trips and stuff they're due. And then every two weeks when I go through my little kitchen shelf, I also do a purge of the front of the fridge and clear out what doesn't matter anymore. Okay. Now, the next step comes with my third holding spot for paper, and that's a filing cabinet in my bedroom. We do keep our bills and like insurance documents and all that adult stuff, obviously, but I don't want to keep that in my kitchen because it's like the worst paper magnet, right? So when you have stuff that you need to keep, have a final resting place for it, but like somewhere else. And for us, it's this little filing cabinet. So when I go through that kitchen shelf and I pay all the bills and all the things, I take those papers I need to keep for like, you know, adult things straight to the filing cabinet and I file them all at the same time. Again, it's the same holding place idea.

Even though the bills are going to the filing cabinet, if I was walking bills to the filing cabinet, which is like on the other side of my house, it's not a huge house, but I'd have to walk there like every single time. I would get super annoyed. So having that holding place, it spaces out. the need to make decisions and put things in their place, like, right away. And it doesn't cause, like, a lot of chaos because the holding place is doing its job. It's there for a reason. And it, it works. If I have a holding place in my kitchen that keeps things that I can use within the two weeks, it's doing its job. It's holding it very kindly. And then the things that I need to keep in that filing cabinet, it's doing its job. I can walk it all there at one time, goes in its holding place,

and it just sits there happily until I need it or shred it. Okay. Now, I want to get into kids, art stuff for a second because the holding place concept works even better for that. I have three kids who all love to draw and who go through a ream of paper every couple of months. I have two storage places for kids art and it's kind of the same concept as the catch-all in the kitchen and then the filing cabinet. One is a holding place for anything and everything the kids make. And then the other is the final resting place for art I want to keep because here's what happens. Your son gets into Minecraft and starts drawing the entire family's Minecraft characters. It's adorable and you want to remember it.

So you put it in a special kid's art box of stuff you're keeping. But he keeps drawing those same pictures and some are more elaborate and worth keeping. But you've already got like a growing pile of Minecraft family pictures from your kid and your kid's art box. Again, magnets. Paper is magnets to each other. So here's what I do that you might enjoy doing. I have a giant basket. I mean, it's like giant.

Like you put blankets in it next to your sofa. And that is just the holding place for what the kids draw day after day. It's wide enough for big papers and projects and like deep enough to hold literally hundreds of papers. We have this big cabinet in our kitchen like dining room that has all the art supplies. So the big basket is on one of those shells in the cabinet. And I will try to remember to put a photo in the show notes. so you can see kind of the setup. But when the kids draw and they leave out dozens of papers on the table,

some that are super cute, I just gather all of them up and I put them in the big art basket, every single paper. And then when that basket gets full, I go through the whole thing. Now I can see all 30 Minecraft family drawings and I can choose my favorite one and the rest go in the recycling bin. And then here's my fifth spot for paper. I have this long, shallow tubberware box.

It's in another room, just like the filing cabinet, like that final resting place. It is, it holds all of the art pieces that I want to keep that have been collected over years, like all my favorite art pieces for my kids. Okay, so here is a perspective that could kind of help with your paper and even your stuff. You don't get to keep an endless amount of things or papers. you have finite space for your stuff. So when that plastic box of keepsake art projects gets full, I don't buy another box. I tend to what's inside the box. Maybe I take photos of those pieces and I make them into a book so I can keep the art without having to keep the actual art.

Or maybe I go through that box and sift a little because it's not all as necessary as it was when I went through it the first time. The point is that your containers are meant to, to contain. If a container is overflowing, it's not time for another container. It's time to simplify what's inside the one you already have. Okay. So this is a lot of information and granted, this is just how I do it. But let me recap the five holding places for paper and maybe you could sort of figure out how those could go in your own house. Okay. So I have the five holding places for paper. And you don't necessarily need the exact setup I do. But I think that having some place in the, these categories is helpful. Okay, so I have a little shelf in my kitchen for papers I need to keep,

but I don't want to take care of right now. Okay? And I take care of those within two weeks. I have my fridge, that's number two, for things that need more urgent attention and need to stay in sight. The third place, I have a filing cabinet, which is where things go that I need to keep, but I'm technically done with. The fourth place is that art catch-all box, and I have that art keeper box. That's the fifth one, right? So the art catch all is for like all the art so I don't have to think about it right now. And then the final box is the final box when I go through and make the decision the one time. Okay, so to wrap up, let's go back to those three problems and there are three solutions from the beginning of the episode. Problem one, there's just too much paper.

The simplest solution, don't let it accumulate. When you walk in the house with a mail, get rid of what you already know you're going to get rid of. Problem two, we don't know what to keep. And the simplest solution for that, decide once what to keep and make that the rule, not the exception. And problem three, what do you do with all the paper? Where does it go? The simplest solution is to have catch all holding grounds for different kinds of paper

and deal with them on a regular basis so that you won't lose your power or your house because you didn't pay your bills. Okay? I hope this helps you think about paper in a more lazy genius way. And again, you get to decide what matters to you and create solutions around that. Don't copy someone else's system or mine just because it works for me unless you have the exact same priorities that I do. Otherwise, you're just going to stay frustrated. But thinking about those problems and those solutions, what your priorities are and then the kinds of paper you have,

especially with that idea of the holding grounds and even the containers that contain, I think that's, that you can start to see a better path through your paper. And if you're feeling like you could use this kind of perspective on things other than just paper, don't forget to check out the swap, the lazy genius guide to decluttering for life. A link is in your podcast app or at the lazygeeniescollective.com slash lazy slash paper, which is where you can find the show notes for this episode. Okay. That's it for today, you guys.

Thank you for listening, for subscribing, for being on the mailing list, for leaving reviews on iTunes for sharing the episodes on Instagram and offering up great ideas in the Facebook group. I'm just really, really grateful for this community and how encouraging you all are to me and to each other is such a gift. Have a great day, friends. I'm Kendra. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Bye. Have you ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that more dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough.

Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.