356 - 2020 Declutter Files
Organize 365 Podcast
Lisa Woodruff
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
These weeks between October 1st and Thanksgiving are typically the most productive weeks of the year. I want to help you make October super productive by helping you declutter. I want to give you tasks you can complete in 15 minutes a day so you can declutter some different areas of your life. I am focusing on decluttering only, not on organizing or productivity.
When decluttering, the way to make it easier, faster, and more effective is to create rules for your items. Rules free us! With rules, you will make quicker decisions and reduce your decision fatigue. You don’t need to stop and consider each item’s value or importance, you will refer to your rule and rapidly decide to keep or toss.
This week, we are focusing on decluttering the file cabinet. The Paper Solution launched in August of 2020, and I am hearing from many of you how helpful that book is in getting your paper under control. For the fall, I want to help you declutter and reduce the amount of paper you are managing (and will later organize).
When it comes to paper, you need rules. There are different kinds of papers - I think of papers as being parts of different categories. First, all actionable paper belongs in your Sunday Basket®. For the podcast today, I am focusing on decluttering your archive (sometimes called reference) papers.
When you make your rules, you need to answer two questions:
- What will I save? (or what will I toss/not save)?
- How long will I keep this category of paper?
In the podcast, I share examples of the rules I use in my own life for my own paper for several different categories:
- Manuals & warranties
- Phone books
- Kids’ school papers
- Pets
- Home decor paperwork
- Automobiles
I do not always keep papers, and I’ll explain why I now discard many papers in these categories. If you sort through 3-5 folders from your file cabinet each day, it will typically take around 15 minutes. Focus on identifying what you want or need to keep, and toss the rest (of course, shred sensitive private information). Most people are able to reduce their saved paper by 50-80% when decluttering this way.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week's mail bag comes to us from Holland. I'm such a newbie to this program and I have tried several different ones over the past year that just didn't make sense to me. |
| 0:10.0 | I've ordered all access because I'm just that excited about it. |
| 0:14.0 | I took the Clutter Bug quiz last night while listening to Lisa's podcast on Bugs. |
| 0:19.0 | I'm a butterfly. |
| 0:20.0 | That explains all of the baskets that I have all over my house. I can now give |
| 0:24.8 | myself permission to keep it on the macro level and if items are in a container |
| 0:29.2 | that I can't see I label it which has made it so much easier for my husband to know where things go. |
| 0:35.3 | I've been saying for the last couple of months, if you don't like it, don't hold onto it. |
| 0:40.1 | My husband actually pulled a pair of swim trunks out and he said, |
| 0:44.2 | I don't like these and I want to get rid of them. That is the first time he has ever said that. |
| 0:50.3 | I'm calling that a major win in celebrating it this morning. Thank you Organized 365 and Lisa. |
| 0:58.0 | Do you have an Organized 365 success story? If so, we would love to hear about it please send us an email at |
| 1:05.3 | customer service at Organized 365 and tell us how you have taken back your home |
| 1:10.6 | your paper and your life with Organized 365. |
| 1:17.0 | Welcome to the Organized 365 Podcast. I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert, and motivational speaker Lisa Woodruff. |
| 1:31.0 | This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting functional |
| 1:37.8 | organizing in your home. I have so much to share with you so let's get started. I do not want to waste one minute of your productive October. |
| 1:50.9 | I'm telling you if you really start following the energies of the seasons you will notice |
| 1:56.1 | the last two weeks in September through the first two weeks in November are the most productive eight weeks that we have in the United States in the entire calendar. |
| 2:05.2 | So I'm going to make these next four podcasts very short and very actionable. |
| 2:11.0 | We are going to be talking about decluttering. |
| 2:13.0 | Normally, I talk about organizing, but I am not going to talk about organizing. |
... |
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