Common Ways to Organize Paperwork
Chronological and Categorical Methods of Organizing Paperwork

Two ways to organize paperwork are categorical and chronological. The categorical method of paper organization starts with setting up categories. The chronological method requires sorting by date.

Once sorted, a file organizer helps with organizing paperwork so that important documents are easily located when needed.

This file organizer box accommodates legal or letter size files. Store your tax files or any other paperwork that you need to keep for several years. Significant savings on this file organizer if you purchase 6 or more. Each year when you have completed your taxes and other financial priorities, put you papers in the box and then put a label on the outside of the box with that year. This way at a glance, you can see each year's worth of papers stored in the box. File organizers like this are best used for storage, not regular access. Keep any documents that you might have to access regularly in another filing system that is active during the year.

The Categorical Method of Organizing Paperwork

This method of organizing paperwork is by far the best way for organizing personal papers that find their way into every organized home.

For the "organizationally challenged" the difficulty often starts with creating the categories. Do house taxes go under "House", "Finances", or "Taxes"?

If you understand that the reason for setting up categories is not to figure out where to FILE it but rather to figure out where to FIND it then it might be a little easier.

When setting up your categories try to set them up quite broadly. With the example of filing the papers for "house taxes" house is definitely the broadest category as these papers are for the house or the house finances or the house taxes so obviously house is the category.

Once you have a broad category set up then you can create sub categories within the larger more broad category.

Simply arrange your files alphabetically in a file organizer for storage and easy retrieval.

The Chronological Method for Organizing Paperwork

This method of organizing paperwork is simply to file in chronological order by date.

You might want to set up your files labelled by the year and then the month and place the papers in the proper slot.

There is a big problem with this method of organizing your paperwork.

Let's say you need to find a statement from the department store as proof of purchase for a defective product you bought several months (or years) ago. Unless you remember the exact month you bought it you would have to go through each month (at least 12 folders filled with papers) to find that statement. However, if you file by category simply go to the file labelled "department stores" and search through the few statements that are in there.

Since a statement comes out once per month even if you bought it one year ago there would only be twelve papers in there.

The most important thing about organizing paperwork is to have a system.

These two different ways to organize paperwork each have advantages and disadvantages but using a system is better that piling papers in a shoe box and hoping that you will never need to find them again.

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