http://www.bin-store.com/blog

I’ll be honest. For a person who blogs regularly about decluttering and organizing, there are some spots in my house which are anything but neat and tidy. One of those spots for years has been the pile of paper clutter which towered behind my laptop on my desk.

Recently my laptop keyboard stopped working, making it necessary for me to purchase a USB keyboard. Having nowhere else to put it, I had to set it in front of my laptop and move my paper clutter to the side in a much smaller space. It towered even higher there, and was making it hard to get at other items on my desk.

So I could put it off no longer; I needed to get it under control, and fast. I needed to come up with some paper clutter solutions. That meant dealing with two problems:

• What to keep and what to toss
• Finding the time to deal with literally hundreds of assorted documents and miscellaneous items

I decided to follow one of the home organizing tips I’ve shared on this blog a number of times, and just do a little bit at a time. I knew I wasn’t going to find the time or energy to sit down for hours on end to take care of it.

But could I commit to just sorting or tossing five items each weekend? Sure. That would literally take no more than five minutes, and so long as I was careful to prevent incoming clutter from adding to the pile, that would take care of it within a few months at the outside. That may sound slow to you, but the pile really daunted me.

So a couple of months ago, I got to work. I used a variant of the organizing in 15 minutes a day system, committing to far less, but determined to get through it. I’m happy to report that my paper clutter is now almost completely gone! Here is what I learned along the way:

• A lot of the items I’d allowed to pile up had long ago lost any relevance, and probably could’ve been thrown out within a week or two of when they arrived (old insurance papers, etc.).
• About 80% of the paper clutter really was clutter. I was able to throw it away. The rest was easy to file.
• It got easier as I went along. When I finally could see the progress, I found I wanted to get rid of 10 items instead of 5, and I’d do it voluntarily several times a week. So I made progress faster and faster. Getting started is the hardest part.

In the end, I can say that I let the paper clutter intimidate me far more than it had to! Organizing clutter isn’t too hard if you take it in easy stages. I hope my experience gives you perspective on your own projects. Like me, I think you’ll find that once you start to see improvements, you’ll feel encouraged and motivated to do more. So if you’ve been putting off a decluttering and organizing task, get to it—you may achieve results more quickly and easily than you think!