High Maintenance Mom

Clutter is a big problem in our house. We were both pack rats well before we had kids and didn't anticipate how much effort would be needed to keep the house presentable with kids. Over the past year we've been working on a faster system for organizing our mail and we've managed to come up with something that works for both of us. The system is based on four baskets -- To Read, To Pay, To File, and To Shred...

Before I begin, I want to mention that I've put our name on lots of "do not mail" lists and although I do not believe that they are generating more mail, the change, if any, has not been noticeable. We also both enjoy reading and feel the need to look at the material that comes into the house. At the same time, we both feel strongly about shredding but we're better at sorting than actually shredding.

When mail comes into the house, it goes into the To Read bin. If the person bringing in the mail has time for sorting then the mail gets opened and sorted. If not, then the mail is sorted at night or at the latest, within the week. We sort into the four bins plus recycling. All recycling is added to our daily newspaper and cardboard products in the recycling bin in the kitchen.

The person who pays the bills looks through the To Pay bin every few days. Once a bill has been paid, the date of payment is written on the bill and it goes into the To File bin. The plan is to file and shred once a week. I like to open the shredding and recycle everything that doesn't have our name on it, if I have time. Sadly, I could write a long article on our shredding habits and arguments so I'm only slightly embarrassed to share this part of the plan.

Prior to having kids we had separate files for each credit card, utility, etc. Now we have one file for each month. There was some discussion about whether bills should be filed in the month during which the purchases were made (as The Pocket Physicist requested) or when they were paid (what I wanted). As you can probably already guess, we're using my system, mainly because I'm doing most of the filing. Sorting all the bills by month and sticking them in a folder is so much easier than trying to locate the 15 previous folders for each type of bill that I really don't mind. Plus keeping all the bills for the month together makes it easier to view monthly expenses.

The final part of the plan was figuring out how to deal with our 17 monthly magazines, three weeklies, and countless catalogs. We were both surprised by how many we get and feel a little bit better about our difficulty keeping up. To deal with the large volume of reading material, we now stack them on the coffee table in a pile for each of us. Monthly magazines are recycled after two months and weeklies are recycled after three weeks. We used to save more catalogs but we now try to recycle them within a week since we can find everything on the web. One of the hardest parts of our new system is recycling magazines we haven't read. There are a few magazines lying around from previous months but overall we're getting rid of them faster.

I'm sure this system looks a little involved but it really works for us. In the past we had stacks of mail buried under stacks of magazines in our living room. Now I enjoy working through the baskets in front of TiVo in on some evenings. The next step will be to cancel a few of the magazines...

Tags (testing this out): organize mom