Bloody pulp.

[Salty]

FUCKING PAPERS.

Papers in the mail, stuffed in there by some helpless, hopeless mail person who must weep when they turn on to my street with no clear idea how more papers are going to be shoved in there. Papers from doctors and lawyers and financial institutions of all shapes, sizes, frequencies. Fucking job applications, and claims, and rental applications and reimbursements and retroactive denials and claims and regular denials and receipts for a million things that I don't want but must buy because that's the way of things. I need bananas, I get a receipt for bananas. Rebates and sign-in sheets and coupons COUPONS COUPONS that I never asked for and don't use and they just keep piling up. No return address to yell at.

Papers on the floor, papers in my car (glovebox, floor, under the seats, in the trunk), papers on the counters next to a pile of dishes that NEVER GOES AWAY, papers in cabinets and drawers, papers in boxes made out of PAPER. PAPERPAPERPAPERPAPERPAPER. PAPER COMBINED IN A BOOK FULL OF NUMBERS I CAN ACQUIRE WITHOUT THE PAPER SITTING ON MY DOORSTEP. PAPER COMING OUT OF MY FUCKING MOUTH AND EARS AND YOU KNOW PAPER ALL OVER MY ASS. GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, NO NEWS, POOR EXCUSE FOR NEWS.

So much paper, and so much of it useless beyond my ability to express.

[Triple Zero]

Put holes in the important ones and put them in an ordner. One ordner per year. Tab sheets are nice.

Mail goes into your inbox. Throw the envelopes away immediately. At least once a week move stuff from your inbox either to the trash or to the ordners.

Throw everything else away.

Especially the magazines and the ads.

I don't know about coupons, we THANKFULLY don't get as much of those over here so they tend to randomly wander around my house but there's not too much of them to become a problem.

Oh another tip, if you got a scanner or a good digital camera, you can scan your receipts and important documents, throw away the originals, and they won't take up ANY place at all! Especially good for heat-printed receipts, which will fade in a year or so.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The title of this thread makes me think of the orange-eating contest.

[Salty]

Ein Ordner! Warrum habe ich das nicht gedacht?
Danke, Trip.*


*Translation:
Whooooooop!

[Jenne]

This is why old ladies carry those little plastic envelopes with tabs in their purses, Alty.  You can get them at an office supply store.  Paper clips work well with paper envelopes, too (the envelopes get worn after a while, but still work fine).  I also use ziploc baggies like a fiend when I have to organize something quickly.

[Triple Zero]

Ein Ordner! Warrum habe ich das nicht gedacht?
Danke, Trip.*


*Translation:
Whooooooop!

Hahahaha

"Ring-binders", of course. You want the big ones, two-ring binders with a lever, like this:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ordner_mit_Tippklemmer.JPG

Folders are also pretty good for shorter term projects (as well as keeping a bunch of printed PosterGASM posters and flyer/rant leaflets). I prefer the ones that have some sort of elastic band thing to keep them closed. Buy a 3 or 5-pack of them now, then continue to keep an eye out when they're on special offer somewhere for cheap.

You also want one of those plastic stackable plastic drawer things for as an In-Box. Well of course you want two, because they aint stackable for nothin'!!! Except you only need one in-box (really) (cause as soon as you're sorting you might as well take it out of "in" and put it in its proper place in the ring-binder right away, optionally making a note in your day/weekplanner/todo-list notebook if it needs actioning later on). So I just keep a stack of blank printer paper, envelopes and stamps in the bottom.

Also what Jenne said, check out the office supply store, they have all sorts of very inspirational basic office thingies that make you think "hey yeah, I could USE those!" (except don't buy too much cause some of them appear more useful than they are in practice, you can always buy more things later).

And, maybe there's better places, but when I was in NYC, I visited a K-Mart, and they had an office supply section, with loads of different stuff (I just needed some index cards and a small funny looking notebook), and most of it was pretty damn cheap, there. You don't need expensive office supplies. As soon as you have to buy new ones every once in a while, you'll figure out on which you might want to spend a littlebit more (I think sometimes a yearly personal planner diary organizer is worth spending to get the Moleskine brand version of. Moleskine notebooks are stupid, they just look extra pretty, but their organisers are really really good, you can tell how much thought has gone into designing it and they look extra pretty)



You may notice that, even though I am a complete computer addict hacker geek, all this stuff is paper plastic ink and meat based. This is because it works just as good, is slightly more intuitive, a computer has WAY too much distractions when I need to do boring administrative things, and I don't trust my computer to not break down or decide to become obnoxiously slow just at the moment I need it--yes even hacker geeks get that¹.



¹ I thought it was just Windows, but even Ubuntu gets slow. Next time I'm install Arch Linux, which has nothing, so I have to build everything from scratch so I'll know exactly what's under the hood and then I will report back on what the fuck that slowness-gremlin really is, one day I'll catch it in the act.

[Jenne]

I have to confess I'm lazy when it comes to paper pushing.  I let them pile up around me.  So I've constructed "piles that make sense" that I just try to organize more or less regularly.And I make sure the piles have their own place, their own purpose, and a receptacle of their own.  Kinda helps cut down on the pile drive.