Let’s get into my favorite filing strategies! S (SORT) – Why I Recommend Sorting Files By Person Today, I recommend you start with what’s in (or should be in) your filing cabinet and/or what you would instinctively call “Household Paperwork” as shown in the light blue table above. Not coincidentally, they are all the papers we typically keep in our family filing cabinet, and you probably do too.

You may see other categories that could or should be grouped together for your circumstances but today, I am going to show you how I sorted through our “Household Paperwork”…a term I’ll use to represent the following (blue) Paper Types below:īased on your lifestyle and needs, you may lump other Paper Types into this “Household Paperwork” group (especially Personal Documents or Child Papers), but since I’m going to show you alternative storage filing strategies for those kinds of papers later in this series, these blue highlighted Paper Types are the ones I will be showing and discussing today. And while you are certainly welcome to work through each and every Paper Type one at a time (which may be warranted depending on how much paper you have), there may also be Paper Types that can be logically worked through together. Last week, I introduced the concept of Paper Types as a method for breaking down AAAALLL the paper in your home into workable categories. As such, if you are just joining the series, I strongly suggest you review Part 1 and Part 2 before diving deep into this post. Pssssttt – Each and every post in this How to Organize Paperwork series builds on the previous one. I have a hunch this kind of paperwork is the one that may be the most overwhelming and time-consuming for most homes…so I’m going to show you how I made sense of all our household paperwork while sharing some filing strategies to help you make sense of yours too! Let’s get started, shall we? Today, we are (finally) going to get into the nitty-gritty of our first Paper Type by applying the S-P-A-C-E method to a majority of our paperwork: household files. I’ve already heard from several of you saying what a difference my approach makes, taking a truly overwhelming task and breaking it down into concrete and manageable chunks (hurray!).

Last Friday, I taught you all my tried-and-true, systematic approach for cutting through the paper clutter in our homes.

Highlight room paperwork