Please keep me going, give me stories of how good it feels......

[LoveMyGirls]

I AM going to sort my paperwork and do my accounts and generally get my paperwork up to date...........just as soon as I've procrastinated enough.........HELP! KICK ME!

Large kick up backside with size 5s and then thinks about own paperwork, huge pile of which is in corner of room

Get on with it.

Stop putting it off

there's no time like the present.

Don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today

is that enough for you?

Get shredder (if you have one) and binliner next to you. Go through each piece of paper and immediately put in a pile of

rubbish, straight in binliner
shredding, straight in shredder
filing
action

then do the filing if you have a filing cabinet. If not, find somewhere for it to live

bet you can do it in udner an hour like this. I did all ours on Friday and now know ther eis nothing awful lurking in the paperwork. Altohugh there were about £50 worth of cheques.

It will feel so satisfying when its done. Plus throwing things away has a good feel to it too.

I'm splitting it into sections

update Paperwork (done)
Sort reciepts
enter to spreadsheet on pc
file reciepts
throw out old paperwork (anything older than 3 years? or 5 yrs?)
go through everything and chuck out stuff I don't need
file anything we do need

Havent got a shredder but dd1 (age 9) has offered to rip up anything we don't need (until she gets bored) she has also brought me a drink and wants to make me a ham sandwich, she is being really good today!

Do I need to keep out of date mot certs/ insurance docs/ old phone bills etc?

No to phone bills, I would for insurance docs and for MOT (not sure why though!)

the inland revenue can ask for stuff going back 7 years iirc so pay slips and benefits stuff.

I LOVE it when I have cleared backlog of paper work, I feel cleansed a really wonderful feeling!

lovemygirsl, it is me and you both! but my whole house is so upside down that the paperwork always ends up being last on the to do list. my tax return is yet to be done too, but i had time to bake cakes today(?????) and I NEVER bake.

I will join you in the paper war and do one pile today, using WWW's m.o.

Number4 - you might find this useful, posted by crokky yesterday.......

Household Paperwork!

Before storing it, you need to strip it down to the essentials. The amount of paperwork that comes in the post for an ordinary family is shocking. There is 4 of us and we just have standard stuff, but still get mountains of paper. Any paperwork that contains information that can be found on the internet can be binned IMO. Any info that is duplicated elsewhere, bin.

We have:

-1 lever arch file for household and car stuff. Stuff needs to be thrown out of this regularly. eg bills, MOT cert etc
-1 lever arch file for money related stuff (mortgage, bank account, life ins, child trust fund etc). Stuff gets thrown out of here sometimes.
-I concertina sort of box file thingy (about 4 inches deep) for things like passports, birth certificates etc. Stuff that doesn't get thrown out.
-1 ordinary box file (instructions/guarantees/receipts etc). Throw stuff out regularly.

NOTHING ELSE!

If I get an instruction manual in 20 languages, I cut out the (probably 2 or 3) English pages and recycle the manual. I really don't keep anything that I don't need!

This may sound incredibly sad, but I have set myself a timetable of smaller chores to do each week. One of these is filing (Thurs pm, by the way). I have to spend 30 mins filing. We had quite a backlog and now stuff's much tidier. I found the prospect of doing everything all at once far too horrendous, but 30 mins is much more acceptable and long enough to make decent inroads into the mess.

I always say that everytime yet I still end up with a minimum of 6mths worth everytime I finally do "do it!"

This time I'm also chucking out stuff already filed!

Do you ever keep catalogues,i don't mean big ones like Next/Argos etc., but i sometimes get leaflets/cataloges through the post which i keep 'just in case' i have quite a few of these and wonder if anyone else keeps stuff like this or just chucks it away?