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What starts as a couple of flyers, a few torn articles to read, post-it notes to attend to, bank statements to file and/or bills to pay on the desk can become, over the short period of one week, a depressing, sliding pile of things you just can't deal with. So the cycle begins. Too much stuff equates to depression and the feeling of being out of control. Fortunately the clutter monkey can be tamed with small changes in habit.

An Organizer will tell you not to have a work space in the bedroom or kitchen. The best is to carve out anarea of the home that is dedicated to office tasks. A kitchen or dining room work area is also seen upon entering the home. When cluttered it looks bad and gives you one more thing you feel the need to apologize for.

Daily purge habits:
For any office space give yourself the ergonomic ease of flow that will induce habit. By ease of flow I mean you need to have, within an arm's reach, a temporary and very simple filing system that is easy on the eyes and from which you can later cull the good from the bad for "final filing" elsewhere. The best one for a kitchen or dining room office is a short, portable file bin usually on rollers. This is readily moved out of the way to convert the kitchen/dining room to primary use as needed. They come in manageable plastic and metal with sizes that can house many hanging file folders into which you can store labeled file folders.

The hanging folders can house all of your temporary reference and items to attend to. One folder can be labeled "bills". Into that you slip the single manila folders - one can read "Bills to Pay", another "Bills Paid to File" and yet another "Receipts to File" etc. Another hanging folder can contain "Ideas" or "Contacts" and so on. Write down what your common transactions are or as you need them during any given week and that will dictate what you need to file regularly. Not just file but FIND regularly. A good, alphabetized filing system will save you hours of frantic tearing about looking for that note you wrote or name you just gotta have NOW.

Direct mail and flyers;

On first entering the house I recommend a single wire or clear plastic bin. I don't recommend the stackable black plastic horizontal file storage units. They are too easily knocked over and will quickly fill up and hide what's been stuffed in there. When you are settled in there is a simple thought for direct mail. One look to determine usefulness, then toss it into recycling or into temp hot zone bin for later perusal and filing.
A 'hot zone' is a temporary dump box giving you both freed up surfaces and one single localized place to concentrate your searches, culling and filing from at some point in the day. Once a day clean it out for 15 minutes to prepare you for the next day. The hot zone box can be a plastic flip-top bin or cardboard banker's box type - whatever works for you.

Never allow junk mail on your work surfaces from the get go. See De-Cluttering Step by Step for more…

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