I Organized 25 Years of Sentimental Paper Clutter — And It Was Actually a Blast

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I tend to let paper clutter (Old insurance claims! Bank statements! Ancient apartment leases!) build up. “I might need this later,” I say, which is a complete lie. In no place is this more evident than in a corner of our “office” space. (In our Brooklyn apartment, our “office space” is just the room that leads out onto the deck where we fit a desk, our dog’s crate, and our bike rack.) 

Because it operates as a mixed space — you can even find the occasional cleaning appliance shoved in a corner and my dog’s ever-moving basket of toys — things can accumulate. Paper, for sure, since it’s right next to our desk, but also hats, dog bandannas, miscellaneous wires, and whatever else that might not fit on our desk that we pop to the side as we’re working. 

Well, one day, I had just about enough, and decided that it was time to conquer my paper clutter (and the buildup that I let surround it) without spending money. I’m a big fan of using a KonMari “lite” method (or “twisted” Konmari, as my editor Terri Pous puts it), so after I cleared out broken equipment, hats, and other miscellaneous items that were not part of my reorganizing task, I headed over to Marie Kondo’s website to see how she recommends getting rid of paper clutter. 

First, Kondo says, you should set aside your sentimental paper goods. This was the easy part — in this little, weird corner, I had a box my dad had mailed to me a few months prior full of report cards, baby pictures, old creative writing projects, high school plays, and dozens of dozens of passed school notes to my friends. 

I put the entire box aside and then cleared away lots of other paper, almost all of which got shredded and put into the trash. After about 20 minutes of ruthless tossing (which was punctuated by me asking my husband what trash of his I could throw away, or what I needed to put in his music studio space), I organized what remained into papers we frequently use and need and into papers we don’t use as often, but still need, and put them in a safe space. I then turned to the much more difficult (and sentimental) task at hand: the big box full of memories. 

But it actually didn’t feel that difficult. There’s something so nice about going through these old papers. First-grade report cards! The first short story I wrote! An “autobiography” of myself that I wrote when I was in elementary school. I threw out the truly useless old paper — I did not need proof that I volunteered at a summer camp in middle school, for example — and did my best to organize what remained.

Because this challenge was a zero-spend one, I put off tasks I’ll need to eventually do — like make photo albums of my childhood photos, a memory book from a trip I took to Europe when I was a teenager, and put whatever childhood report cards I want to keep in nice, neat file cabinets.

In the meantime, I reorganized the folders and files by year, bagged up the old photographs to keep them safe from dust and other potential debris, and neatly placed everything that remained back in the box for now. 

Next step will, of course, be to get a file cabinet — and to look through more of the paperwork depositories in my house. A file cabinet is one of our big goals for the space. Once we get that set up, everything will never be disorganized again. (Maybe.)