The best way to organize documents is alphabetically. But when the stuff to classify is more voluminous or heterogeneous, the task usually becomes harder. One thing that I had some struggle with was stationery. Some of my particular difficulties were:
- As a compulsive writer, I had cupboards cupboards filled with binders, folders, useful or disabled pencils, backup diskettes/cds/pendrives…
- I am also one of those guys for whom a stationer’s is like a toy shop, so many times the beautiful notebook comes first and only some months later, if ever, the idea of what to do with it.
- To make things even worse, as a genetic family gift, I have a faint but unquestionable disposophobia, that makes very hard for me to throw away anything: when I receive a present, my natural tendency is to store the wrapper and the box in which it came in, “just in case”.
Stubborn as I am, I made lots of attempts to keep myself on top of things on the stationery issue. In all the occasions, the main problem turned out to be the same: I wasn’t able to establish clear enough categories for all the stored stuff, so very usually, when the accumulation tide rose, there appeared several “blind points”, areas of disorder or things that could belong to too many areas, which thus I could not find later, so the whole system soon became unreliable.
Then one day I realized that I was trying to reinvent the wheel. A whole industry was working for me if I wanted to see it that way.
I took the catalog from a commercial stationery chain, opened it and there it was, on page 3.
I started a new session of stationery arrangement, only this time with the happiness of knowing that it was going to be the last one.
I numbered the sections in the catalog, and started to make heaps in the floor according to each category. It is easy to see that the stationery chain has done its best to create intuitive, easy-to-access categories.
Once the heaps were made, I got a suitable container for each of them. (The tiniest one now is # 10, “machinery”, which in my case only contains a small calculator. The biggest one, #5, “Filing and presentation”, requires several boxes.)
All of those areas have subsections, but by now I am alright with this degree of classification. I keep the catalog as my “Rosetta stone”, and consult it in those cases when I’m not sure about where to put something.
And that’s quite it. Well, one more thing: besides this storage, I have found interesting to have a separate container for “favorites”, the kind of stuff that I am most bound to need in brief: a packet of sheets, a few notebooks, the most regular kind of pens and pencils… In everyday life, this is the container I use the most, I put in there whatever I like to find later, and it has become like a “treasure chest” for the grown up kid that I am.
And again one more thing, re: compulsive hoarding. I also have find a way to cope with that by setting limits. One of the things that turned out of my arranging was that most of the disorder was related to “Paper manipulation”(#6) and “General storage and services”(#11): packaging, plastic envelopes… that kind of stuff that you keep because you have an environmental conscience, and because it “might be useful later” (I don’t know about you; I usually discover that I need one of those things shortly after having thrown them away). My solution was assigning one BIG container to each of those areas, and make an agreement with myself: “I’ll store anything as long as it fits in the container”. That way disorder stays localized. It works fine so far.
What about you? Have you find any better solution? Something that helps? Any other field in which you have got profit of something industrially manufactured?
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