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Meet my desk. Oh, can't see it? It's that thing in the corner buried under piles of paper. There are also stacks of stuff on the floor and batches of business cards still lingering from BlogHer '08! I need to get a handle on dealing with all this paper before I accumulate even more at BlogHer '09. But the magazines and advertisements from places like The Container Store urge me to buy more STUFF to organize the STUFF I already have.
There must be a cheaper and more eco-friendly way!
So I put the question to readers of Fake Plastic Fish last week, and wow did they come up with some great solutions for me. As my friend Axelle commented, "What causes clutter isn't lack of space to store it but the clutter, itself. Before you buy new storage units, make sure you've gotten rid of all your clutter."
Bloggers to the Rescue
Erika from Red Shirt Knitting wrote a fantastic post about organizing strategies in a small space. Her post, "Reducing Clutter: Ooh, Me! Me! *raises hand frantically*", written in response to my plea, is chock full of great suggestions.
Another blogger who answered the call was Melissa From A Life Less Complicated who looked at her own clutter problems and attempted to solve them. Her two posts, "Less Clutter: Part 1" and "Less Clutter: Part 2" have some great ideas.
Anna From Green Talk forwarded me an awesome post on the subject. In "The Junk-free 30 Day Challenge" she explains how junk is bad for the planet and why buying more junk to store all the junk is even worse. Her tips for escaping junk are excellent.
Reader ElizabethB recommends Apartment Therapy's "Desk Cleanup Befores & Afters" article. Wow. Some of these desks are worse than mine!
More than one reader recommended the web site Unclutterer.com.
What a wealth of information. With all the comments, the great links, and blog posts, I could read about uncluttering for a year and never actually start the process. So here's my attempt to distill some ideas that are the most relevant for me.
1) Cut off the Flow of Incoming Paper at the Source.
There wouldn't be so much paper to organize if there weren't a constant river of new paper coming into the house in the first place, would there? Reducing paper usage is not only a good method for ditching clutter, it also helps save trees and other resources. Here are a few ideas from my readers and other bloggers:
Switch to paperless billing and online statements. This one should be a no-brainer, and at this point, I actually have very little business mail that comes in paper form. The one hold-out was my investment company, and just this month they offered a paper-free option as well.
Say no to Junk Mail. There are several organizations that work to help us reduce unwanted junk mail. Tonic Mailstopper, 41Pounds.org, Catalog Choice. Unfortunately, direct mail companies are not under any obligation to honor third party requests, so you may have to call companies directly to make the requests yourself. Green America has a great list for ways to get off and stay off junk mail lists. And Forest Ethics has begun a campaign for a National Do Not Mail Registry. Sign the petition here.
Photograph business cards. This is my favorite idea! Instead of taking home a pile of business cards from BlogHer, I can take a digital image of each one with my little camera. Then, instead of having to go through them and enter the info into my address book, I can use OCR software to automatically read and categorize the information. Two programs were recommended to me by readers: Evernote and ScanR. After trying both, I like ScanR the best because it will actually create VCards from my images.
Replace loose paper with notebooks. Christine from Simple Savvy says "I got rid of my small paper clutter by using a pocket notebook to keep track of lists, book names, phone numbers, etc. I
