Drowning in paper
- by Elizabeth Gresson
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- 24 May, 2019
How to rise above it
I hate paper! I don’t mean books or magazines, although I make sure newspapers and magazines are recycled straight after reading and not allowed to pile up.
For years I worked in solicitors’ offices which don’t seem to have changed much since the days of Charles Dickens, with stacks of bulging files piled up on shelves and on the floor round the desks. Every morning my boss would put fresh letters and documents onto my desk which had arrived in the post or been printed off from email. We literally went through reams of paper in the printer every week, often duplicating documents, in my view, unnecessarily. Some days I felt as though I couldn’t breathe for all the paper around me.
Many people work in offices like these and don’t want to come home to a house which resembles them in terms of piles of paper everywhere. Working from home is a great option, but again there is the ever present danger of paper building up if it’s allowed to happen.
Now that I’m a professional organiser, my mission is to provide freedom from the paper that seems to come into our houses faster than we can deal with it. Things like the leaflets through the door advertising all sorts of things from pizzas to conservatory blinds, the letters from the bank, charity requests, renewal reminders from insurance companies and many others. We print emails and attachments off, planning to read them at our leisure. It doesn’t take long for a stack of assorted paperwork to pile up.
My 5 top tips to stem the tide of paper:
1. Always select the paperless option. Have all your bank statements, council tax bill, insurance schedules, utility bills and mortgage statements sent to you online. Create a folder specifically in your inbox for these so you can easily access them when you need to.
2. Sign up to the Mail Preference Service. This will stop direct mail companies and charities from sending you unsolicited mail. Register at mpsonline.org.uk. Be aware that it may take 3-4 months for the mail to completely stop.
3. Don’t pick up freebie magazines or papers. Be aware that this is really just advertising material wrapped around a bit of interesting material. They don’t contain anything life-changing that you can’t access elsewhere.
4. Now HMRC is going digital, there is no need to keep your receipts. There is now a range of software which is HMRC compatible, so you can say goodbye to the shoebox of old receipts. My personal favourite is QuickBooks (www. quickbooks.intuit.com/uk/).
5. Use your local library. In my area (Hampshire), you can pre-order the book you want online and choose which library to pick it up from. You can then return it to any Hampshire library. So collect at your local one, and return it to the one nearest your place of work.
One client, an editor, told me he felt that I’d edited his life when I dealt with his paperwork and I think it’s an appropriate analogy. Editing means cutting out what you don’t need and tidying up the rest.
What I offer to my clients is help to reduce the amount of stuff they have, making their lives run more smoothly. Tackling the tide of paper achieves both of those things.
These are probably the two most common questions I’m asked when I speak to a potential client.
When I help clients I work to their agenda, not mine and they will always have control over the process. I don’t tell them how we’ll work or what we’ll keep. We start where they choose, in the area that’s causing them the most problems. It could be that a bedroom is so full of stuff that they can no longer sleep there. It may be that they have books spread all round the house and they want to make space in one room to put them all together. They may have a garage stuffed with boxes which still haven’t been unpacked from when they moved in several years ago. Their house may be ordered and organised but they’re paying monthly fees for a storage unit full of stuff which they want to sort through.
We start by going through their thing and I ask them to decide what they want to keep. When I ask them about an item, this gets them to really think about it and what it means, if anything, and enables them to make a decision about whether to keep it or not. One client told me that this process made him accountable. Not to me, but to himself.
The process can take time. I worked with a client who found it very hard to let go of certain items of clothing. She knew she wouldn’t wear them again - they came from a time of her life that was over, but the decision was still hard to make. With some items we spent 20 minutes talking about each one before she was able to let them go. At the end of working with me, she told me she had found it “therapeutic”.
I can encourage decisions and provide some perspective, but the choice is always the client’s.
Most people are (rightly) concerned with the environmental impact of their decluttering. Many of them though, don’t know the wide range of things that can now be repurposed and recycled. I do know, and I’m able to reassure them that most of what they let go can be reused in some way. I don’t believe though that a desire to keep something out of landfill warrants holding onto an item if that’s the only reason to keep it.
So, if you want to get the clutter cleared but are anxious about working with an organiser, be reassured that with me it is a gentle process where you won’t come under any pressure or have any judgments made.
Contact me for a free half hour consultation and see how I can help to get it All Organised for You!
Many of us have things in our houses which have a story attached to them. The Chinese vases that Great Uncle Harry brought back from Hong Kong; the clock grandfather was presented with when he retired; the silver napkin rings which were a wedding present; or the chair that was in the hall of an old family home. When we’re in the position of having to consider what we have - maybe for a house move - we often enlist the help of our families. They too know the back story of these items and they are just “Uncle Harry’s vases”, “the chair from Albion Road”, or “grandfather’s clock”. There is no thought or consideration about why we have them and often we don’t see them anymore. They’ve just always been there. Other family members wouldn't want the items in their own houses, but they are reluctant to see them discarded because of the obligations of the back story.
When I work with clients, I don’t know the history or associations of any of their possessions, and I will simply ask about that clock, those pictures, that ornament. When a client tells me the story, it’s like talking to a therapist who is completely detached from it. As the client starts to tell me about the background of how Great Uncle Harry, or their grandfather acquired the item and how long it’s been in their house, they start to ask themselves the significance of it. Maybe Great Uncle Harry was their husband’s relative, they never met him and actually they don’t like the vases very much. The clock may have a loud annoying tick and is kept in a cupboard and never wound up. Once they have worked through the process of considering the item and its meaning to them, they very often then feel able to let go of it. They can tell family members that they don’t want it any longer, and if the rest of the family feel strongly about it, one of them can take it. Not surprisingly, when confronted with this, the family members often agree that it can be sold, or just given away.
For me, decluttering is about making mindful, intentional choices about what we have in our houses. Our homes are about us, what’s important to us and what we value. It shouldn't be about holding onto things from an obligation to other people. I wouldn’t want to think that someone kept something in their home that they didn’t like, simply because I gave to them, or that my children felt obligated to keep possessions of mine that mean nothing to them. I would prefer that they passed it onto someone who valued it and actively wanted in their home.
So, give yourself permission to let go of the things that you’re only keeping because of their back story and only have in your home the things that mean something to you. If you want my help to support you through the process, get in touch and let’s get started!