Saturday, March 2, 2013

Shredding Queen

Sang to the tune of Dancing Queen....

I am a shredding queen...


Yesterday I got a wild hair and decided to do a bunch of reorganizing. I don't know what started it really, but the next thing I know I am going through drawers and file cabinets and catch-all boxes and bins and sorting, trashing, creating a donate pile and filing a bunch of stuff away.

As I was getting to the filing part of the organizing I realized that I have a TON of miscellaneous old, outdated, irrelevant paperwork cramming my file cabinet.

I mean...pay stubs from 12 years ago. Yes, seriously. (I have moved them HOW many times??) I also had a bunch of duplicate files, and files for accounts and properties I haven't owned in years (decades??). I decided it was HIGH time to purge all that and consolidate.

So I pulled all the files out that I knew for sure were ready for the shredder, and then went through a dozen or so more files, trashing, shredding or saving and filing correctly as needed.

Let's just say what started as a large stack of files was whittled down to just a few small files.

But this is what is left:



 The terrible tower of to be shredded documents!!


The sad part? This isn't even all of them. I did a whole bunch of shredding before I took this picture, AND there are two other big drawers I haven't even touched yet!


This is bags two and three of shreds, plus my non-shred paper recycling bin which has been filled and emptied four times already.

And see this:


No matter how hard I try, there is still little bits of shredded paper all over the floor. Then Roxie went and laid in some of it and then drug it around the house stuck to her fur.

I can see a date with the vacuum in my future.

What about you? Are you a paper saver? Or do you trash everything right away? I'm always afraid I'm going to need some random document from 2002 (apparently) so I keep everything. But I'm getting much better. Most of my accounts don't even send me statements by mail anymore, which is good and has cut way down on the amount of stuff I need to file every year.

Well...since I am no where near done with the shred fest, and I have the worlds cheapest shredder that only works for about 5 minutes or so before it gets too hot and has to take a break, and only can handle about 3 pages at a time....I better get back to it!!

3 comments:

Shorey said...

I'm ultra paranoid I have stuff dated back to 1997 still. However, I keep it in the far end of our attic ;). I probably should go through it and burn what we no longer need.

Funny that Roxie felt the need to track it through the house.

Have a good Sunday.

TTFN
Shorey

Corrie Beebe said...

Those are my cats...always so helpful!

Ruby Badcoe said...

The “touch it once” thing never worked for me because I tend to be forgetful and need to have something to refer to. I’ve been told to try organizing my papers into file folders or compiling important information into one file, but it’s a lot of work. :( Do you want to deal with mine? Haha, just kidding! Jokes aside, I should probably dust off my shredder and do some organizing of my own before I find myself sleeping on stacks of paper from 10 years ago.