Fail to be Perfectly Organized

Setting up and maintaining a workable filing system can often be a hard project to jump into. The longer we wait to get started, the more the paper piles up, until we are faced with a mountain of clutter. We want to get organized and to be able to find that important document at a moment's notice, but we get stuck.

One of the biggest problems we often create for ourselves, often without even being aware of it, is that we want to be "perfectly" organized. For example, we might have a bill from the doctor's office and we can't decide if it should be filed as a medical document or as a financial document. We don't want to put the paper in the wrong place, so we put it nowhere.

This can be very self-defeating, but can be easily remedied. We need to remember that filing systems we create are used as a guideline to help us organize. Therefore, there is no perfect or correct categories, just the categories that work best for you at this point in your life.

If you can't decide which category to put a piece of paper in, just make a temporary decision - put it in one of the categories that makes sense, and remind yourself that you can change it later if need be. It is still better to have a medical bill in EITHER your medical or financial file than in a big unsorted pile where it will be nearly impossible to find it.