Question for office workers, students and lecturers:how do you sort out paper work, where you are not sure,if?

Question

you are not sure, if you need that stuff again, but one the other hand you need to throw things away, otherwise they accumulate... ?

Answer 1

If your sure you will need it - you file it away in a folder with similar material.

When I am not sure - I put it in a deep (12") drawer. When the drawer is full, I throw out the bottom 4-5 inches   Usually by then its 2-3 months old and if i haven't needed it by then I feel fairly confident in throwing it away

Answer 2

I have a box of hanging folders, and I sort them into classes in case I need them again.  When I run out of folders, I throw out the contents of the oldest one - but that's a few years later.

The same idea can be applied with file cabinets, etc.  Go to Target or Wal-Mart or a similar store and see what kind of organizers they have that can work for you.

Answer 3

Hi.

There are two basic approaches.

The first is just to dump everything in boxes and chuck it away at the end of the year if it has not been used.  This is OK for up to say three boxes because if you really need something you will find it.

The second is to sort everything into category files.  However, before you do this you need to be realistic - unless you keep this up it is a complete waste of time, and you will spend the time in your initial rush of enthusiasm to file half of it, and still have to go through everything anyway.

BTW financial documents are different - just because you have not used them in a year does not mean you can get rid of tax records !

The way of the future:

If you have access to a fast scanner with a cut sheet feeder (on a good quality photocopier, for example) why not store everything electronically in .pdf format ?  just scan it all to one big document (or maybe say 200 pages at a time) If you then run the Acrobat OCR software it is searchable using something like google desktop and you can find things in seconds years later.