Marie Kondo

My basic principle for sorting papers is to throw them all away. My clients are stunned when I say this, but there is nothing more annoying than papers. After all, they will never inspire joy, no matter how carefully you keep them. For this reason, I recommend you dispose of anything that does not fall into one of three categories: currently in use, needed for a limited period of time, or must be kept indefinitely

Limit yourself at first to sorting papers that give you no thrill at all and finish the job in one go. Letters from friends and lovers can be left for when you tackle sentimental items.

My filing method is extremely simple. I divide them into two categories: papers to be saved and papers that need to be dealt with.

Make sure that you keep all such papers in one spot only. Never let them spread to other parts of the house. I recommend using a vertical organizer in which papers can be stored standing up and designating a specific place for it. All papers requiring attention can be placed in here without separating them.

As for papers that must be saved, these I subdivide according to the frequency of use. Again, the way I divide them is not complicated. I organize them into infrequently used papers and more frequently used papers. Infrequently used papers include insurance policies, guarantees, and leases. Unfortunately, these must be kept automatically regardless of the fact that they spark no particular joy in your heart. As you will almost never need to access papers in this category, you don’t have to put a lot of effort into storing them. I recommend putting them all into a single ordinary clear plastic folder without worrying about further categorization.

The other subcategory consists of papers that you will take out and look at more frequently, such as outlines of seminars or newspaper clippings. These are meaningless unless they are stored in a way that’s easy to access and read, which is why I recommend inserting them into the book-like pages of a clear plastic file folder. This category is the trickiest of them all. Although papers like this are not really necessary, they tend to multiply. Reducing the volume of this category is key to organizing your papers.

Papers are organized into only three categories: needs attention, should be saved (contractual documents), and should be saved (others). The point is to keep all papers in one category in the same container or folder and to purposely refrain from subdividing them any further by content. In other words, you only need three containers or folders. Don’t forget that the “needs attention” box ought to be empty. If there are papers in it, be aware that this means you have left things undone in your life that require your attention

Moreover, the majority of them usually have materials for multiple seminars on the same or similar subjects. Why? Because what they learned at the seminars did not stick. I am not saying this as a criticism, but merely to point out why it isn’t worth keeping materials from past seminars. If the content is not put into practice, such courses are meaningless. A seminar’s value begins the moment we start attending, and the key to extracting the full value is putting what we learn there into practice the moment the course ends.

It’s paradoxical, but I believe that precisely because we hang on to such materials, we fail to put what we learn into practice

Getting back to warranties: the filing method I recommend is to put them all in a single clear file, without separating them into categories. Warranties are only used once a year if at all. What point is there in carefully sorting and separating them when the odds that they will be needed are so low?