June and her Paperwork Mountain

Our consultants don’t just help people clear their clutter.

They can help you focus on a specific type of clutter which can be particularly useful if you’ve already done the clearing, sorting and categorising but need to organize and store what’s left.

June was one of the 17% of our top tip subscribers who say that most of their clutter contains paperwork, so when she called us to ask for help we weren’t surprised by anything she had to tell us.

The trouble with paperwork is that it seems to continuously grow before your very eyes…….. it comes in almost daily with the post.  There’s always bills, bank statements, marketing, free papers, charity envelopes, take away flyers, and unless we have a way of keeping up with it all, the mountain is bound to grow. June fitted our classic criteria for someone who had paperwork clutter out of control, so she booked a 1-2-1 home consultation specifically to work through her paperwork clutter. We had the telephone consultation and June had all her paperwork clutter in containers when Clare arrived because she’d already done the categorising and sorting using the eBooks and Category Cards.

Clare started working with June by doing the preparation work – working through a couple of exercises with June to see why she had so much paperwork, where it was coming from, and where the problem in her ‘clutter cycle’ was.  Clare knows that when people have clutter that’s out of control then there’s a stage of the clutter cycle missing, so we just needed to find out what was missing and find a solution that suited June, her home, lifestyle and way of working (which is unique for everyone).

Once Clare and June had identified the root of the problem they got to work categorising the paperwork into it’s sub-categories.  As with all clutter, you can’t decide how to store it until you know how much you need to store, so this was an important step in the process. 

They then spent the rest of the day doing the organising, identifying suitable storage solutions, and deciding what processes and procedures would work best for June in the future to keep it under control.  As with all paperwork, it’s not a ‘one hit wonder’ clutter clearing session as paperwork comes into our home every day, so we need a process and procedure which will help us keep on top of it. June then used the 6 weeks of follow up to adjust and tweak the processes and procedures that had been devised on the day of the home consultation as she was able to see how they worked in practice.

As June told Clare:

I can’t believe how simple you made it, and I realized that I’d been worrying too much about how to store and organize my paperwork before I even knew how much I needed to keep.  You helped me to take a step back, not be overwhelmed by it, take it a week at a time and most importantly accept that it doesn’t have to be perfect first time.  It was as if you were holding my hand at every step and now I wonder what all the fuss was about!  I know it’s sad, but there’s something great about being able to find your passport or last bank statement in an instant!