Ask HN: How do you organize your physical documents at home?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1472457

by my_new_account • 16 years ago

12 24 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have lots of paper for taxes, receipts, statements, bills, letters, brochures. currently they are just tucked into various folders ad-hoc and put into a cabinet in no particular order.

Any tips or experience on how to sort things and keep them organized?

rada4• 16 years ago

Dropbox saved my life. I scan everything except for the last seven years of taxes (required in the US).

mbyrne• 16 years ago

why wouldn't you scan your tax returns?

rada4• 16 years ago

I scan them however there is still a legal requirement to keep copies for 7 years:

http://www.irs.gov/publications/p552/ar02.html#en_US_publink...

ydant5• 16 years ago

Copies/scans of most everything are accepted by the IRS (Rev. Proc. 97-22).

rada4• 16 years ago

Accepted for filing, yes. But if you get audited you are required to provide paper records:

http://www.irs.gov/publications/p552/ar02.html#en_US_publink...

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

Here's my system.

Every piece of paper gets a number written on it in bold felt-tip pen.

This number is near unique - usually the date that I'm filing it, sometimes a "natural date" such as a date on the paper itself.

I file them all in a single box, in order.

In a file I have a line per item. It starts with the number, then has as many "tags" as I can think of. This takes about 20 seconds per piece of paper.

grep is your friend.

Finding any item is now easy, and there are no decisions to make when doing the filing. I copy the index file to my handheld and laptop. Occasionally I print it, although I haven't done that in ages.

A few items are filed in separate files, but those are obvious.

pfandtasse• 16 years ago

You could use one of those stamps automatically counting one up when used.

I'll try this. What hinders me from scanning is that you flip through paper much faster than through a bunch of pdf-files.

cperciva• 16 years ago

The Bodleian library in Oxford is one of the largest in the world, and they have a very simple way of organizing books: They are numbered as they come in, go onto a shelf in that order, and an entries are made in a database saying where to find each book.

I use more or less this same approach: Everything goes into a stack, and when I need something I just do an interpolation search through the pile using the date of the document as a key.

capedape• 16 years ago

Scan or take pics of them and add them to Evernote. Keep only the essentials. Works for me.

frossie2• 16 years ago

First, I suggest you get a Fujitsu ScanSnap or other straight-to-Evernote scanner. Seriously, because once you start doing that you will realise how little you actually need to keep in paper format.

What remains depends on your life situation I suspect, but for ideas, here is what I do:

Some papers are truly important. I like to put those in one of those expanding files with multiple slots and a carry handle. I have one for my personal papers (will, passport, birth certificates etc), one for taxes and one for the house documents. These should be stuff that if the house is on fire, you want to grab and take with you.

Having taken care of the stuff you don't need in physical form, and the really important stuff you must curate carefully, that leaves a bunch of other stuff. In my case that is mostly product manuals and warranties, and personal and travel memorabilia. While I am not a hardcore GTDer by any stretch, I do follow it for filing: get a filing cabinet, a good label maker, hanging folders and file folders, and file the hell out of everything. For example for product manuals, have a hanging folder for kitchen appliances, put each separate manual in a file folder, label the folder with your labelmaker, insert file folder into hanging folder.

General clutter guidelines apply, like handle everything once, think about whether you really need this ever again (this is where scanning really helps you, as you don't have to agonise too much about the decision), etc.

ydant5• 16 years ago

Search for and download those product manuals and put them in a digital shelf. You never look at them, anyway, do you? Most manuals can be easily found on the web these days.

Unless I plan to resell a small electronic, I don't keep the manuals. Small electronics I keep the box, manual, everything, but in a box in a closet. It does help resale vlaue.

Otherwise 100% agree. I'm just amazed you're a scanner, but you keep paper manuals.

frossie2• 16 years ago

I'm just amazed you're a scanner, but you keep paper manuals.

Don't worry, I understand it sounds peculiar.

One reason I keep manuals is for when I re-sell the product later, like you said. I also freecycle a lot of stuff, I feel it's nice to give people the manual. Also they are not zero-effort to scan - some of them are larger than letter size, you have to take the staples out if you have a feeder-scanner and so on. Given I can fit them all in one filing drawer, it doesn't seem to be worth the hassle. And if that is all you are filing, it is actually faster to pull the manual out of the drawer than it is to look for it on a computer, print out the page with the diagram you want, and so on.

If it helps, I generally throw out boxes. I used to keep them for resale but it got out of control, so the only boxes I keep now is for stuff where the box comes with special packing inserts that I would need if I had to move - that means computer cases and monitors basically.

johnswamps• 16 years ago

I use the noguchi filing system (http://www.lise.jp/noguchi.html). Basically, it's just an LRU for documents. No categories, no filtering, just insert everything on the left side (whether it's new or something you just accessed).

I think any filing system you use needs to have O(1) no thought required inserts because inserts are so much more common than reads. I'm willing to tolerate a bit of time looking for what I need (though I can usually find everything fairly quickly) since I only do it a few times a year.

alphaBetaGamma• 16 years ago

I had a great system for the kind of documents that you will only need in the far future, or not at all, but for which it would be a major issue if you actual need them but can't find them: tax stuff, receipts, statements, bills...

For this kind of documents you want to minimize the probability of loss, minimize the time to file them, and are not too concerned of the time to retrieve them. For this a drawer is perfect: just put them in the top of the drawer, and do not use this drawer for anything else. It does not look very professional but is very effective:

- It takes 1 sec, thus diminishing the probability of not doing it and losing the paper.

- Documents are organized chronologically, so you can find what you are looking for quite quickly. Just be sure to religiously keep everything in chronological order.

Once per year, transfer the drawer’s content to a folder. If you fill up more than one drawer per year this system might not be good enough for you.

Alas, my gf did not see the beauty of this system, and insists on having a highly sophisticated and complex storage system that I think is strictly inferior on every account.

BigEd781• 16 years ago

A box. A big box.

sjs382• 16 years ago

Seriously.

How often do you need to find mail that you have filed? Once a month or so? How often do you need to file mail? Much more often.

Optimize for many writes and few reads. Just throw everything in a box in chronological order. Everything will be easy enough to find and VERY easy to file. The most you should do is have a couple of boxes for broad categories of stuff to file.

imp• 16 years ago

A nice big filing cabinet that's sorted alphabetically. It's been great. I put things in manila folders that are labeled with a label maker. Straight out of GTD. It's helped me a lot.

MadQA• 16 years ago

I've got a few filing folders with binders, each with different color of cover: red for bills, green for hardware guarantee docs, yellow for various (mostly government) docs.

visural• 16 years ago

Anything that comes in gets scanned to PDF, filed, and backed up to multiple disks + the cloud. If the physical copy is tax/business-related it's filed in the current year's tax folder. Otherwise its shredded.

aaroneous• 16 years ago

ScanSnap S1300 and Mariner's Paperless (osx)

Ask HN: How do you organize your physical documents at home?

Related Stories