Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jan Black. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the amount of paper you've accumulated? Have catalogs, magazines, and tack records

taken over more space than you'd like? Are you at a loss to decide how you'll ever conquer

the paper clutter around you? Well, if so, you'll want to hear what our guest, professional

organizer Lisa Woodruff has to say. Lisa's the author of several books on organization,

including the latest, The Paper

Solution, What to Shred, What to Save, and How to Stop It from Taking Over Your Life.

Lisa, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. You say the number

one daily organizational challenge for people is getting and keeping a handle on the

paper in their lives. Why do you say that? You know, you think it's not. You think that your paper

lists and your paper piles really don't matter that much. It's just a little bit of mail here or a note

or two there or your to-do list. But if you start to really observe your life, paper is everywhere. And

where's that paper? Where did I put that? Where did I write that down? Did I mail that bill?

Did I, where's the invitation for the party we're supposed to go to? And you'll find that your

life is very paper-based and you're spending a lot of time trying to find information,

trying to corral information,

trying to get things done, and you never get to the bottom of your paper pile.

When we first learned we were going to have you on, I thought to myself, how is she so interested in paper? Like, what sparked this? And there's a really interesting story. So tell us that.

Yes. So about 10 years ago, my father fell ill

and my sister and I were his power of health care and power of attorney and ultimately had to

settle the estate and sell our family home. And we found that we were dealing with so many

emotional and family issues and planning funerals and all of that. But there was so much paper. Like, because I was four hours away whenever I would end up at the hospital, you know, every couple of weeks, they would give me all of these numbers that were supposedly in the range of normal, but I was like, well, what was the number yesterday? What is the number we're trying to get to? And how low does this number get before you give them a blood transfusion? And so we started writing all of this down. And it wasn't until we created a binder

where we could write all of the information down and pass it back and forth so that we would have

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