How To Get Rid of Piles

Are you overwhelmed with all of the piles around your house? Are there heaping piles of “who know what’s in there anymore” lying around on every table and nook you can possibly think of in your house? Maybe just the thought of THINKING of going through those piles completely depletes any desire to ever get organized in the pile area of life!

Piles just happen. Lets face it. Piles happen the minute you get the mail. The minute your child brings papers home from school. The minute you want to work on a project, such as paying bills. Piles just happen.

The question is: how do you keep your piles from being mountains? Or maybe even being a pile at all?

Here are a few solutions:
1. Find all of the piles in your house. Ask: WHY is there a pile there? Does the pile even fit the room that it is in? For example, do you have piles of bills laying on your dresser in your bedroom? That would be a place where piles should NOT be.

2. Decide where you would like to have your piles (if you need them at all). If you choose to still keep piles of papers, choose ONE central location so that you can contain the mess.

3. Decide what categories you want to have your piles for. Some suggestions: bills, papers that need filing, papers that just need a minute or two to go through, papers you need to revisit, etc.

4. Start going through the piles. This will take time. As you go through them, you WILL feel more organized and probably find papers that you forgot about in the first place.

I have been working on not having ANY piles in our house – AT ALL. I have gone through needing a filing cabinet to store all of my papers in, to keeping a pile on the kitchen counter, to keeping a small stack on a corner, to NOTHING. And I have to say, it takes work to get to that point, but it is completely worth it!

So what does it take to not have ANY piles?
DEAL WITH THE PAPERS RIGHT THEN AND THERE – if not immediately, THAT WEEK.

This means:
1. Paying all bills and filing the paperwork promptly

2. Go through your mail as you walk back to your house (make sure to look both ways before crossing the street first :)) and dispose/recycle of anything you do not even need to open.

3. Open each piece of mail (instead of just setting it in a pile) and decide if you can spare the extra minute then and there, to just take care of it. This is where it gets tricky for some – dealing with it right then and there. We are so eager to see what’s in the mail, but we have ZERO desire to actually deal with it – except to maybe look through a new magazine we just received. Spare the magazine and deal with your mail right away!

4. When someone brings in a piece of paper, decide if action needs to be taken or if it just needs to be filed. If it needs filing, file it right away. If it needs action, grab a sticky note and put on the paper WHEN you will be dealing with it so that you are held to a personal deadline.

Again, what it comes down to is: DEAL WITH PAPERS AS SOON AS YOU SEE THEM. If you do, you will prevent any pile from accumulating. Your counters will thank you, your family will thank you, and in the long run, you will save time. Trust me. It will be worth the effort!