Minimalism: Papers In Progress – Part 2

I finally had a chance to make more progress with going through and shredding my seemingly endless amount of papers. In my last Minimalism: Papers In Progress, I went through my primary desk in addition to one file cabinet drawer and it has been 42 days since then. Within that time, I was out of town travelling close to a month, but have spent several days in the past week making more progress. However, I must admit in the time since I last posted, more piles of papers were created on my primary desk so I lost some progress from my last post. All of these papers were those that I accumulated in those 42 days – mail, bills, and receipts.

My secondary desk in my office had several piles of papers, to the point I could not really see under the glass top. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I’ve completely seen under the glass top in years as there has always been at least one pile of papers on it. These piles were a mix of receipts, random self written notes, shipping label confirmations, packing slips from packages received, clippings from magazines/brochures, and papers that should have been filed into the file cabinet. For the most part, a majority of them were papers I needed/wanted to action in some shape or form. In about the same amount of time it took me to go through 1 file cabinet drawer, 12 hours, I went through the papers on both desks over a few days. It was a much smaller volume of papers, but since I had to take actions on a majority of it, it took much longer to get through.

The last post resulted in 10 bags of shredded papers. My two desks resulted in only 4, though one bag was about double the size of a typical grocery bag so would equate to 5 typical grocery bags of papers.

After I was done, I cannot even begin to express the lightness I felt looking at both of my desks cleared off of numerous piles of paper. I had mentioned before that my office would cause me physical discomfort seeing the chaos of papers. I am proud to say that negative feeling has significantly decreased after clearing my desks. I don’t think I’ll achieve true peace until I finish the last file drawer and bankers box that I didn’t complete after the first session, but is sure feels good knowing that I am at least halfway through the process and I can walk into my office without seeing the source of my previous anxiety!

I do have papers in the vertical file on top of my primary desk that need action before I can get rid of them, but they are actually mostly work related. I only have 2 that are personal that need to be taken care of this week. Next up is the file drawer, which I still dread doing. A lot of what is in there are not accounts that have online records, so I will have to painstakingly go through each piece of paper and scan a majority of them before I can shred them. Some of them I know I will need to keep – tax documents, insurance policies, other important documents, etc. I anticipate this will take me the longest of all, but I will attempt to try to get it done in 1 final session, (worst case scenario, an additional two sessions). Wish me the perseverance to get through it all, down to the last piece of paper, so that I can finally claim completion of papers and move on to the next category!