This morning, I managed to let go of a large pile of documents. They’ve been weighing on my mind for a while. I’ve been meaning to scan them and they just piled up and up. I used to have even more but a couple of years ago, we went through and scanned everything.
Since I’m in decluttering mode, after clothes and books, we come to documents. Spawned on by watching Tidying up with Marie Kondo episode From Students to Improvements (1) where one of the guys struggled with letting go of his notes, I got moving.
Marie Kondo categorizes documents into three types;
1) Pending – items that you are working on.
2) Important – paper you need to keep for tax, insurance, etc
3) Reference – notes that you refer to regularly, for example course notes.
Everything else can be scanned and the papers can be thrown away or recycled. I use Evernote (2) to store my documents and then they are easily retrievable. It’s very rare that I need to search for something but I have peace of mind knowing that they are there.
I can breathe a sigh of relief not looking at this pile of paper. The knock on effects are good too. When I start the morning, I’m not overwhelmed by paper. It’s also going to be easier to have a clear desk policy at the end of the day.
Do you have documents to say goodbye to?
Footnotes
1) Tidying with Marie Kondo Netflix series
2) Evernote