Hey there, you're listening to the lazy genius podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 410. How to deal with all the paper. I did an episode on organizing paper like five years ago, and it's solid. It's great,

but it's time to look at it again because paper is everywhere. It's like, it's like,

y'all remember when Michael Scott said in that episode of The Office where they make their own

TV commercial, limitless paper in a paperless world. So good. That's kind of how we live, though.

Like somehow, somehow in this paperless, highly technological world, we are still getting so much

paper. You get it in your mailbox from work, from your kids' schools. Your kids make it

when they paint and stuff. It's relentless.

Maybe you have a system. Maybe you just deal with it whenever you have the energy. Maybe you don't even care. But today I would like to offer a couple of very simple choices in the area of paper

to make dealing with it a little easier. Remember, lazy geniuses are not trying to make things perfect,

especially all at once. We're not trying to fix it all or make sure there are no hiccups or no

wrinkles or no obstacles ever. Pivoting is more important than planning to us. Having a couple of

reasonable choices that we can apply to paper is way more effective than building some

giant system from scratch. We don't do that here. In episode 91, 91, you guys, 91? When I talked

about this for the first time, I said that there are three problems with paper. There's too much of it.

We don't know what to keep. And we don't know where to put what we

keep. I still think those are solid and true and you can totally listen to the breakdown in that

episode if you want. But in the spirit of simplification, I really think that paper poses two

primary problems. Every piece of paper is a deadline and every piece of paper is a decision.

Every single one. Even the ones you don't think have either. So just to kind of get going on this,

let's look at some examples. So a birthday party invitation that has multiple deadlines.

There's the RSVP deadline, which is really you're like, am I going to

this thing? Deadline, the get the person a gift deadline, and then the actual event. There are also

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