Transcription
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Our next question is from Buck. Hi, this is Mr. Buck, Helena, Montana, curious about paper clutter and how the best way to work with that. Doesn't care about it when I need order. Um, it's something that just eats at me every day, and I, uh, think I have a fairly good handle on it, but just curious what triggers, what things, or what ways I can do to help subside some of that anxiety. Thanks so much.
Buck, it sounds like you need to declutter the other person in your life, and that will bring great order. Right? In fact, if we have no relationships in our life at all, then my life will be perfect and complete. I mean, this is the story I tell myself sometimes because I relate to Buck. I need my space to be a particular way. I'm obsessive and compulsive, and paper clutter also drives me crazy.
I'll give you some rules that we've set up that I think will help. One is the "No Piles Rule." And if you're doing this with someone else in the house, you have to get them on board. You have to show them the why behind it instead of just the what or the how-tos. How-tos are boring, and people don't want to see like, "Oh, you what? You're just telling me that I have a new rule that I have to follow?" That doesn't help anyone in our house, though.
What we do is we have something we call the "No Piles Rule." We don't let any mail or packages or bags or any accessories pile up on the counter. Flat surfaces become a repository for excess stuff that I don't want to deal with right now. And so the "No Piles Rule" says at the end of each day, we eliminate any piles that have accumulated on flat surfaces.
I do want to talk specifically about paper clutter and address this with you because this question comes up a lot around paper clutter. And I think there the three most common types of paper clutter are photos, books, and then documents. Usually, we think about documents when we think about paper clutter. We got this mail that we keep here, receipts, or, uh, this tax information I have to hold on to. And then we just start stuffing things into drawers or file cabinets, pretending we're organizing it, but we're just hoarding the clutter in a different way.
And so I'll address these one at a time, really quickly. By the way, you can go back and listen to our paper clutter episode. It's episode 322, uh, if you want to do a deep dive on paper clutter. We also did an episode called "Hidden Clutter" because one of the most insidious forms of hidden clutter are these documents and and photos and things that that creep into our lives that are hidden forms of clutter. That's episode 272 for hidden clutter. We'll put links to both of those in the show notes.
But real quick, if you want to deal with your photos, you can get a photo scanner like the one we have. I'll put a link to the photo scanner that I use. In fact, Ryan and I share it, and so like we'll go back and forth if I need to scan some photos. And that way, we don't each have to have one, right? And so you can share this because it's a couple hundred bucks to have a really good, high-quality photo scanner. But then you can scan all the photos you have in your house. And what you'll learn is most of those photos you're holding on to, if they weren't worth being scanned, they probably weren't worth holding on to in the first place. And that also gives me a backup as well. Even if I want to hold on to some physical photos, what happens if I have a flood or a fire? Well, now I can have them backed up on my hard drive or in the cloud. I use Dropbox. You can use whatever service you want to use, like Google Photos, to have some redundancy there as well. I also have a separate hard drive so if anything were to happen to those photos.
And then beyond that, if besides your photos, any books that you're holding on to that are kind of getting in the way, especially old. I find a lot of people hold on to old textbooks that they're never going to reference again, but they think they might just need it one day. The truth is, you could probably let go of those things. But there might be some books where you're like, "I reference them occasionally, so I don't want to get rid of them." Well, there's a service, $1scan.com, that will scan your books for you, and they will incinerate the old book so you don't have to deal with it anymore. And $1scan.com, they are not a sponsor of ours at all. I have used them for a couple of things in the past, and then they will send you the digital file. So guess what? The books are now searchable. You can type in the keyword and you can find the passage in the book that you were looking for in the first place. It makes it so much easier and it gets rid of that clutter.
If you don't want to scan your own photos, by the way, scanscanmyphotos.com is a really great website. Uh, again, not a sponsor, we're not affiliated with them in any way, but scanscanmyphotos.com, if you just have a box of photos you want to send to them, they'll take care of it for you. They will scan your photos and get rid of those photos, send them to you on a disk or a digital file so you have access to those things. Uh, I'm also going to put a link in the show notes to the "10 Best Scanning Services for 2023." It's a little article you have there.
But what do we do about our document clutter? Because that is a whole other thing. The truth is, I don't hold on to many documents. As soon as I scan them, I get rid of them. There are a few documents I have to have, but even those, I have digital copies, and I generally don't need to have a physical copy. We always hear, "You have to hold on to your taxes for seven years." Well, I talk to my accountant. Talk to your accountant before you do this, but, um, I talked to my accountant, he's like, "As long as you have the digital version of your taxes, you're totally fine. You don't have to have a paper copy of everything." I do have a paper copy of a few things. I have one file that has like my Social Security card, and it has my birth certificate, and a few other things that I do need the physical copy of. But everything else is digitized.
Now, there are a couple ways you can do that. If you have an iPhone or a smartphone, generally you can just use the camera on there as a scanner. Now, Apple Notes is a great scanning program. Turns your photos into a PDF, which is really helpful for any paper clutter that you have. And you deal with it right away, so you're not waiting till the end of the year or several years later, you got stacks of papers you have to deal with.
One more link I'm going to put into the show notes, and I'd be interested TK to see if you have any questions about this. This is an article from indormood.com, and it's called "Had Enough of Paper Clutter? This is the Best System." It's like 12 pages long, so I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I really like their system. If you're looking for a system to remove document clutter in your life, here's what they use. Every tool you'll need to conquer paper clutter. Here's a list of supplies you'll need for this system.
Number one, inbox. I use a simple basket from Ikea that can sit on a shelf. Now, obviously, you can get a box, inbox from anywhere, right? Amazon, Target. You can make one yourself. You can go to Etsy, get a local maker who makes a beautiful basket for you. Just make sure you check first to see which store your particular political group is protesting right now so that you don't buy the wrong product and be happy by mistake. So having some sort of box for your papers, and I think this helps with the "No Piles Rule" as well, having a place to put that stack of papers so that you have one destination. You have a pile of papers here, a pile of papers here, a few on my desk. Nope, you've got one inbox for your papers. They sit there until you have time to process them. I would do that daily, personally, but maybe call it once a week for you. I'm going to process these once a week so that you're not dealing with it a month from now, a quarter from now, a year from now, a huge stack of papers. That's when it becomes overwhelming. But if you have a small stack from one day or even one week, guess what? It's not a big deal.
Number two, a fast duplex document scanner. We'll put a link to the document scanner that I use personally. It's document and photo, so you can kill two birds with one stone, or massage two birds with one stone, how about that? And so, uh, use sort of scanner for your documents. You can feed them right in, or if you don't have that many documents, you can just use your phone for that as well.
Having a computer is number three on here, obviously. So this person says, "I use my laptop for everything, working on professional contracts, following recipes for the kitchen, blogging, etc." Of course, using my computer for the scanned documents is one thing that I do.
Number four, this is often overlooked, uh, having a paper shredder. I don't have one at home. We have one here at at the studio, so I'll often just bring a stack of papers I want to shred in my bag. That way, I don't have to own two of them. We already have one, I have access to one. Or quite often, if you have a local document center like a FedEx Kinko's or just a local business center, they usually have shredding or incinerating services, and they charge you like a penny per page or a penny per 10 pages or whatever it might be. So you don't have to buy a paper shredder. We'll put a link to a paper shredder that we use downstairs. It is a high-grade one. We can shred 20, 30 pages at once, which is awesome, but you don't need that to be able to get rid of those sensitive documents.
Number five, online cloud backup. I use Dropbox. This person says, "I use iDrive." You know, whatever service works well for you. We don't recommend one in particular.
A small file box is number six. Um, and so that's if you are actually going to file some stuff away. There are some things you may want to keep. I have a file cabinet at home. Works really well for me, but having a small file box can work also. I have excess room in that file cabinet. It feels good every time I open it. There's like one little folder in there, and I have a few little accessories. I keep my pens and and a few other things in there as well.
And they use a few other things here: an art portfolio, some photo boxes, to-do lists with Google Keep, calendar, notebook, staple remover. Those are the things they use to organize their document clutter. We'll put a link to this article in the show notes.
Any questions or anything to add, TK?
Man, that's a very thorough and helpful list. I learned a few new tricks from that. Um, I'll address one, um, related area here because it sounds like there's not just a digital clutter or a paper clutter issue, but also a communication clutter. Because if there were no other people involved, it sounds like Buck would implement a system and would be happy with it. But it sounds like it's the addition of other people right that kind of throws them off. And so, um, one thing I'd just say to add on is that persuasion is is not just a matter of rhetoric, but it's also a matter of conviction. How you feel when you are articulating what your needs are and what the boundaries are is going to have as much of an impact on how that other person receives you as the words you use. It's kind of like when a little baby is is is crawling and trips or something like that, and then the baby looks at you for that decisive split second. And if you go, "Ooh," or if you go, "Oh, are you okay?" the baby starts crying. Like, there are these moments where it's our reaction that affects how other people feel about it. And so if you're real defensive about what you need, it's going to feel like we're in a fight, even if you're articulating yourself perfectly, right? And so get clear with yourself about why this matters to you and how you want to feel at home. And then you can have a conversation before you say a word about boundaries that goes something like, "Hey, when I come home from a day's work, there's nothing that I love more than my home feeling like a safe haven, a place of peace. And a big part of that for me is just an orderly household. And I'm not asking anyone to be just like me, to need what I need, or to think that anything that they do is wrong. But I love to make some suggestions here for some things that would really work well for me and make me a lot healthier. And I would love to get your feedback and see if we can find a way to make it work for everybody." Because even though sometimes you can play the power card and be like, "This is how it's going to be," and you can get away with it, be careful because you change the dynamic of the relationship once you do that. There's nothing sweeter than getting people to cooperate with you by enlisting them and enrolling them voluntarily, getting them on board with your vision, rather than trying to rule by fiat and manipulation. Because you might get what you want, but what you have to sacrifice energetically at your home just reduces the problem in another area. So those would be my tips on how to make make the needs known here.
Yeah, and I think also what you're exposing here, if it gets in the way, it's clutter. And so the other person in the house may not see it as clutter because it's not getting in the way for them. Buck, you probably have the same problem that I have. I want my house to look like no one lives in it. And who you live with, who you're living with, they don't care about that. They don't care about aesthetics the same way you do. They don't care about paper clutter the same way you do, the document clutter the same way you do. They're not wrong for that. You have different preferences. You're also not wrong for it. Buck, there isn't a real problem here. The problem is the way that we perceive it, and then that problem is amplified by how we communicate, as TK just illustrated.
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