storing papers by date

David Allen, the personal productivity guru of Getting Things Done, talks about organizing papers (etc) by whether they are active files or reference files -- keeping the former close by, and the latter filed separately a bit further away. 

For me, that resonated quite a bit.  I don't have a filing cabinet at home, and so I've stored my papers mostly by year in a multi-pocket binder like this.  I file bills and papers into separate pockets for utilities, medical bills, auto repair, etc.   When a new year starts, I start a new binder.

A binder labeled to hold one years's worth of household records.

Here's one huge advantage of this system, now that moving time has started rolling around:  I don't have to sort through all of my paperwork to figure out which things I can ditch.  I just got rid of something like 20 pounds of paper --- all of it goes to shredding/recycling without having to wonder whether to keep it, all because it's older than 7 years old.   Whoop!

As I move forward, I'll have less paper to store in each of the future binders.  Back in 2010, 2011, 2012, I hadn't switched over to electronic billing so much, so I had lots of envelopes and records to tuck away.  Nowadays, not so much.  But I'll still store whatever I have by date.

I use a similar system for email folders, by the way.   My committee folders get a name like "2018-assessment".   If the committee is active and I'm using the folder a lot, I add a symbol to bring the folder up to the top:  "@-2019-hiring".   If the project is over and done with, I add a "z" to push the folder down toward the bottom of the list:  "z-2016-colloquium".   This system really makes my life a lot easier as I try to keep track of the various tasks I play around with.

This summer, I'm going to try to rearrange my computer research folders along this method.  I've named all my research folders by the topics that the papers were looking at, which makes it surprisingly hard to find exactly what I'm looking for.  I'm going to try to go through and relabel everything by the date it got published -- or at least the date I abandoned the project.  

As I've worked on organizing my family heirloom stuff, I've found that labelling things by date has been really helpful there, too.  You'd think that labeling something "Sam Smith" would make it easier to find -- but if there are several photos of good old Sam, then this gets complicated.  "1872-Sam-Smith" or "1902-Sam-and-Francis" turns out to make sorting and filing a heck of a lot easier, and it makes finding the right picture in a giant list of many pictures WAY easier.  So.  Dated organizing it is.