9 Lessons Learned from the Kon’Mari Method on “Paper”

Hello again, friends. If you’ve been following along, you know that last year I read Marie Kondo’s international best-seller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and each week this month I will be sharing with you nine ways the Kon’Mari Method has helped to improve the organization and quality of life in my home over the past year.

Last week we discussed how my morning dress ritual was transformed from dreadful to peaceful through the Kon’Mari Method. This week I want to focus on the second category outlined in Marie Kondo’s book, my homes paper piles.

If your home is anything like my own, paper spreads around like the sands of the Sahara. It’s everywhere and hard to contain. We shuffle papers from place to place, from pile to pile, but sooner or later, paper will take its toll on the visual place in your home.

I work from home in the legal field. My husband is a public school teacher. I am also a blogger. We are constantly bombarded with papers of all capacities. Decluttering paper, while not as tough as decluttering books, was in its own right an equally difficult challenge.

Keep in mind, the papers section of the book left a little to the imagination as the section was only a scant ten pages in length there were still many lessons on paper that we could learn. So, here are the nine lessons we have learned while using the Kon’Mari Method on paper:

Consider legalities

Regarding legal papers, we utilize a simple rule: if it doesn’t require a raised seal to be deemed legal, it can be scanned, stored, shredded, and discarded. The remaining papers such as voting cards, birth certificates, marriage licenses, mortgage packets, high school diplomas, my husband’s military forms DD214 records, and insurance records are kept in a fire-proof lock box in our home.

Take dates into consideration

When going through our original mortgage documents, tax records, and school records we took the Feds rule into account, we only kept seven years’ worth of documents. All else was scanned and stored.

Art for art’s sake

In terms of created art, we take photographs of artwork and papers we want to remember with our iPhones and post them to Notabli, an app for saving and organizing your child and family’s most treasured moments. Another fun way to save art is to scan art and turn it into online screen savers, which allows our family to be constantly surrounded by the images that spark joy in our lives. The 1% of art that we truly want to keep physically on hand goes into a fire-proof file folder or matted, framed, and hung up in our home.

We re-evaluated what was important

Often people hold onto clutter because they feel it’s vital to their home’s success. To avoid this paper-induced black hole, we signed up for online bill statements, digitized product warranties, scanned only the greeting cards from deceased loved ones we truly treasured, shredded all checkbook registers and utilized our online check services at our credit union, and kept only a year’s a piece of pay slips. Everything else we shredded and recycled.

We created a household inventory

Kondo suggests putting all business papers in one clear plastic folder without sorting them into categories. Instead, opting for fire-proofed file folders. We stored all of our family insurance records. We then created a digital household inventory that lists out insured belongings, emergency information, tax and insurance documents, and our pet records as well. While keeping two file folder portfolios, we minimized our files by focusing not on physical records but by setting up a household inventory binder. This binder lists our overall inventory of insured goods and documents how we want our household to be run.

We rethought mail

We started a new rule, a one-touch rule. Within minutes of mail coming into our home, we sort and file bills, advertisements, and junk mail immediately. All mail that will require our attention later is pinned to our family memo board. We do this to keep papers from drifting to other rooms. Once and done works well for us.

We rethought photographs

Taking a lesson from my family artwork and digitized all pictures using the Notabli app. The only non-scanned photos we have are framed and mounted to the wall.

I rethought my writing

As a blogger and writer, I use paper to sketch out ideas or get feedback from others. I applied Kondo’s method to my blogging by dividing my writing into three categories: assignments needing immediate attention, short-term projects, and long-term projects I might not revisit for months or years. I created a spreadsheet of ideas, added dates to both my blogging planner and Google calendar, and then wrote down all topics on sticky notes which were transferred to a physical editorial blogging board. This keeps my ideas both tangible and within reach.

We gave ourselves a timeline

As a family, we gave ourselves one month to complete this leg of the Kon’Mari method. At the end of three weeks, we had seven bags of paper. And best of all? Our family papers now reside in a single space within our office space, and nowhere else. And to keep chaos at bay we make sure to do a nightly paper sweep of our home and shred unneeded mail before heading off to bed. This is the ultimate takeaway for us, the Kon’Mari method for papers must be maintained daily!

Decluttering our home files has brought my husband and me small joys each time we know we no longer have paper piles all over the home. We feel more organized. We have cleaner office counters. We pay closer attention to papers needing immediate attention. While decluttering papers is an arduous task, I guarantee you that you won’t miss those papers once they’re shredded and gone.

Now, to next week’s category: kimono and mementos.

Friends, have you used the Kon’Mari Method to organize your family’s papers? If so, I’d love to hear about it!

Here’s to decluttering,