Paper Pile Giveaway

Congrats to the winner of Lysa TerKeurst’s book Made to Crave. She is: Kristina; timestamp 11:51 pm on January 5th. Send your home address to me at [email protected] right away!

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Paper.

It piles.

It perturbs.

It is a problem!

Is there any aspect of trying to maintain a clean home that is more unnerving??

Sure the kitchen may get messy.

So what!!

We can always clean it up again, wiping and scrubbing until the counter is clean, the dishes are done and the pots and pans back in their rightful place.

If we want to keep it that way for a while, we need only to eat a meal or two out of have paper actually be our friend (in the form of  plates on which to dine!!)

But with paper it is a whole different ballgame.

While we may be able to spend an afternoon sorting, purging and pitching our piles of paper leaving only the needed ones in our abode, it is only a temporary fix. No sooner have we tossed our piles into the trash (or recycle bin) than a whole new batch enters our home.

They come at us from all directions.

The newspaper arrives.

The mail gets delivered.

The kids return home from school or an extra-curricular activity.

Because we aren’t always sure what to do with this stuff, we end up placing it neatly in a pile.

Oh, come on! Do neat piles actually exist? I’m not sure I ever seen one.

Okay, maybe I’ve seen a few, but they didn’t stay neat for long. As soon as someone was in need of a paper they thought might be hiding in said pile, they rifled through it and left it a complete mess.

And what do the neat piles do to us women?

They shout, “Failure, failure, failure!! Why look at you mom! You can’t even make a decision. You don’t know where to put us so you just choose any horizontal surface within a three foot radius and plop us down.  Incompetent woman! Can’t you even take care of the paper in your home, for crying out loud!!”

Okay, so maybe I’ve never actually had a pile talk to me like an apple tree on the way to Oz, but I have had that exact line of thought run through my brain.

Piles make me feel defeated. They remind me that I was not on top of the ballgame.

I didn’t have a plan for those papers, so there they sit, a stack of unmade decisions I put off until another time.

They are the culmination of the “for now”s in my life.

You know, “I’ll set this mail here, for now. I’ll put these papers on the counter for now. I really don’t have time to think about what to do with these clothes, shoes, toys, store items. Etc… I’ll just lay them here for now.

Gals, the phrase for now is derailing our organizational train!

Well, since January is a time for all things resolution-y, I’m sure many of you have made a goal that has to do with getting more organized around your place.

Maybe with your time.

Or with your cleaning & clutter.

Or your grocery shopping & meal planning.

Perhaps even with your paper piles!

Here’s a little giveaway to help boost your moral. It includes:

~A periwinkle (one of my favorite colors!) three-ring binder.

~A set of whimsical tab dividers for the binder.

~A sturdy vinyl folder with many inside pockets for organizing fliers & such.

~ A set of colorful push pins.

~A set of matching jumbo paper clips.

~A set of push clips for a bulletin board that hold coupons & such right where you can see them.

~A pocket 2011 calendar and matching notepad.

~Some totally fun, swirly-patterned, comfy-grip mechanical pencils. ( I always do my calendar in pencil since things may change & a I HATE a messy looking calendar!)

~An undated desk-size, week-at-a-glance planner pad to map out your days.

~Finally, a personalized copy of my book The Complete Guide to Getting & Staying Organized.

To enter the giveaway you must leave a comment on this post sometime between now & Monday morning at 7:00 am when the winner will be chosen and announced.

Either…..

Tell us what aspect of paper causes you the most trouble….

or

Give us a solution for any aspect of paper problems.

Now, if time is tight or you are simply drowning in paper at the moment and as a result your brain won’t work, simply say, “I’m in!” Drawing is random. :-)

I’ll try to hop on over the weekend and share a few of my paper tips with you too. (NOTE: I have done this in the fourth page of the comments giving directions for how to assemble a Brain in a Binder that will house your papers. Click on the comments & then scroll down to see :-))

Now…get tackling those piles girlfriends!!!!

Pile-busting Blessings,

188 Comments

  1. My biggest problem with paper is just what you said. The piles! I have a filing cabinet that is stuffed and in need of organizing, but it’s so overwhelming that I’m not sure if I’ll ever get to it. In the meantime, I have a pile of things that need to be filed in said cabinet, but that pile has been buried under I don’t know how many days of mail (and a teddy bear, and photo album, and…really???!!! the gift cards my mother sent us for Christmas!!). sigh!

  2. My husband refers to my filing area as “the chasm” because I think it really scares him what all is in there. Thankfully it’s confined to one drawer that does get cleaned out from time to time. Count me in. I obviously have no clue where to start…

  3. I sure could use some help! My family hasn’t been able to sit around the kitchen table for a meal since last July! We are a family of 6. Mail comes in. School papers come in. Schedules get left laying around. Magazines and catalogs show up, as well as books, bills, recipes, and lots of neat ideas! I have tried numerous times to have designated places for all of the papers, but when they get filled, we resort to filing in boxes and piling! Even thought our recycling gets picked up every 2 weeks, I just can’t keep up! HELP!

  4. Count me in! The challenge for me is reading the papers and if there’s something to be dealt with, dealing with it right away so the paper can be discarded. That’s how the piles start and the papers in the piles get forgotten about.

  5. I have a binder that I use for my bill paying. It sits in a drawer with stamps, address labels, my checkbook, a calculator, etc. It has page protectors for various items I need on a regular basis. I have a page with a list of all the bills going down the left side, and the months across the top. When I pay a bill I enter the dollar amount in the correct box. I have an X through the boxes for the months when a bill does not normally need to be paid (for example, property taxes and car insurance are only twice a year, so the X is in the boxes for the other 10 months). I even have a box for each month for “reconciling checkbook” and another for any amount that I transferred to the savings account. Now I don’t forget to pay a bill because I can see at a glance what has been paid this month. I print out a new sheet at the beginning of the year.

    I only keep one bill back from the current bill and shred it when the new bill comes. I store them in the binder in different sections. They go in order of how often they are paid each year. I have a section for annually, semiannually, quarterly and monthly. When I pay a recurring bill (such as a utility bill), I replace the older bill with the new bill that I just paid. I always check to make sure that the right amount was credited to the account from my payment. I figure that if I ever need this bill again I’ll get a copy from the company’s website. In over 20 years of marriage I have never needed to get a copy from any company.

    Hope this helps someone. My problem is all the other papers that enter the house! I have laundry baskets full of papers to file and it takes me forever to find the ones I need.

  6. Just when I get my piles neat, the boys bring home more paperwork and it gets mixed in with mine. Yikes! Count me in.

  7. Most paper ends up on my kitchen counter in a pile! I’m really tired of paper piles…need to work on that this year!

  8. I have all of the above paper pile problems from all the other commenters. Too much paper, nowhere to put it, and too many odds & ends that don’t match to anything else.

  9. The mail and all the paperwork with the committees and organizations we volunteer with!!!! Stacks too quickly.

  10. oh goodness! i have paper clutter every where. when ever my hubby threatens to throw it away…i just move it to a different location. i really would love to win this giveaway:)
    nicolepipkin{AT}gmail{DOT}com

  11. I’m awful with this. I’ve got bills under control – they’re the one thing I have a great system for, but every other paper category drives me crazy. I need help!

  12. I’ve got 3 boys in school now and they come home with soooo many papers. That’s what causes me issues. What to keep, what to let go…

  13. With 5 kids and all their papers it is hard to stay organized. We try, but my husband is the piler and I can’t stay ahead of him! We have 5 drawers (one for each child) that holds all their school “stuff”. I recycle regularly the papers that are duplicated, tape the time-sensitive activity sheets to our school “door” and then sort through the drawer at the end of each semester. Anything not scrapbook worthy gets recycled. At the end of the school year I have a nice shoebox size stack of papers for each child that gets stored in the basement – with all the other lovely shoebox sized boxes….times 5!! Now to figure out how to get through these stacks of paper so I have time to scrapbook all those bins!!

  14. My hubby calls me a “piler” because that’s how I handle all that paper!! Papers of my kid’s from school, artwork, church, etc. is the biggest issue! I also am a natural “keeper” of things, just in case!

  15. What causes me problems are the things that don’t really have a catagory – one of this and one of that who wants a file for just one sheet of paper? I try to recycle any paper that I know contains information I can find elsewhere. (school calendar, events that have websites etc.) Still, clutter is my evil nemasis! It never leaves me! :)

  16. Count me In. I am drowning. I found some plastic accordian envelopes on clearance at walmart after school started. It helped with some papers I need to keep but I still need help with all that comes in. I love seeing you at Hearts at Home.

  17. I am a basket kind of girl. I have one on my counter, three on my baker’s rack and even one that attaches to my fridge. All of our incoming papers get sorted amongst those baskets. It only takes a few minutes to sort and deposit them in the appropriate basket. The nice thing is that the baskets are an attractive addition to my kitchen and hide the pile that exists within.

  18. Count me in as well. I have piles upon piles. I can pretty much find everything I need but this last spring I missed my own cousin’s wedding reception because I lost the invite on one of said piles. Talk about feeling like a failure!

  19. My husband is military, so when he is away, his mail piles up. Who am I kidding, paper is EVERYWHERE!!! I think it breeds when I’m not looking, and moves around so I can’t find anything!
    I’m IN!!!

  20. To help control the paper clutter near the kitchen counter, I got a nice little fabric “bin” (less than $10 at Target) that sits on the countertop. I made three dividers out of cardstock to put inside of it and file mail/papers/invitations this way: 1. Bills to Pay/Immediate Attention; 2. Things to File Away; and 3. Take Care of Later. Now we always know where to find our bills, and as long as we check the “Bills to Pay” area every few days, we get ’em paid on time. After a few weeks, when the bin fills up with “Things to File Away,” then I grab that pile and head upstairs to where our big file cabinet is. When I file things in there, I always try to grab old bills/papers and shred some.

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