Bill and Mary have been married for 32 years. Bill does most of the paying of the bills for his home. Bill has his own system for invoices that need to be paid and for invoices that have already been paid. Mary has tried to learn the system from him, but she thinks it’s confusing. It’s a chilly Saturday morning in mid-February, and they’re ready to try their annual filing cabinet purge. Neither of them is looking forward to it, which is nothing new. Every year they make it their New Year’s resolution to get their papers in order and somehow it just hasn’t happened yet. They both walk downstairs after a lingerie breakfast and head toward their storage area where the four-drawer filing cabinet resides. Bill opens the top drawer and has to pull hard because it’s stuck. As usual, they have too much paper and not enough room to file. He is already frustrated and wonders how long this will take. Maybe next weekend would be better…
Does any of this sound familiar to you? How many of you are looking forward to the annual paper purge? How many of you actually do it annually? How many have ever done it? Our paper problems can represent a source of pain, resentment, and denial. Our filing issues can also be a lot of unfinished business and are usually quite exhausting.
I don’t know about you, but they didn’t offer any classes in elementary, middle, or high school on basic organizational skills let alone paper or paper handling. I was not taught the art of filing and keeping it. I’ve met people who had the perfect “Trapper Keeper” (I’m aware I’m dating myself on that comment), and they seemed to get their act together when it came to looking organized, and probably came to the conclusion that their parents need to organize. Many of our clients call us and apologize for the state of their home, office and various levels of disorganization. They explain that they are embarrassed that they cannot do it themselves and feel that they have to call and ask for help. The funny thing is, if I was going to add some landscaping to my house, I would definitely have to call and get help for that project, since I would have no idea where to start. That is not my area of expertise and I would have to pay people to complete that task. The same is true for the organization. Unless our parents/family members/babysitters were paper-savvy, we either learned a basic paper and filing system from our parents or friends, or even college roommates, or learned nothing at all . The point is that we were probably not taught this skill in any of our years of education.
Now, I’m not going to assume that you even have a file cabinet in your house. I will assume that everyone has submitted something at some point. According to the Hemphill Productivity Institute, “80% of documents that are archived are never mentioned again.” If that’s true, it seems very important to know exactly what documents need to be submitted and what documents we can get rid of. Our product pick is FreedomFiler. It is a remarkable product because it helps you know what to keep and what to get rid of.
Before I start sharing brief information about FreedomFiler, I need to tell you what it won’t do. It won’t file documents for you, it won’t remind you when things need to be filed, and it won’t provide you with chocolate to make the whole process more fun (okay, I’m craving chocolate as I write this.) What it will do is promise to be the only system Automatic file purge available. Once you take the time to set up FreedomFiler, you won’t have to take the time to clean up or reorganize your file system again. “Filing paper in most cases will be almost as easy as throwing it away,” quotes Seth Odam, creator of FreedomFiler.
So what’s so important about this system? There are two main principles of FreedomFiler:
1. Guarantees that you will never accumulate paper again.
2. Eliminate annual purges and save hours in your future time.
Most people set up their files so things are filed together because they sound the same, but this system encourages you to file based on the age of the document you’re filing (short-term vs. long-term). FreedomFiler comes with seven categories that are easy to set up and use due to the tagging system.
Paper is undoubtedly a burden on our brains. There is a light at the end of the file tunnel with the appearance of FreedomFiler. It has revolutionized the way we think about presentation and has given us hope that presentation can be simple and fast once the proper system is in place. © 2006 All rights reserved.
