

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

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.<p>Any tips or experience on how to sort things and keep them organized?
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frossie
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.

~~~
ydant
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.

~~~
frossie
_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.

~~~
ydant
Ok, but I've never had to scan them - it's been literally years since I
haven't been able to find a manual online.

We all have our quirks. I just hate paper/clutter. More than I love books,
which means my book collection is in limbo...

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RiderOfGiraffes
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
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.

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cperciva
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.

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alphaBetaGamma
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.

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johnswamps
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.

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

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

~~~
rada
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...](http://www.irs.gov/publications/p552/ar02.html#en_US_publink10008614)

~~~
ydant
What's the point of accepting for filing (during which for many things you
don't submit the record to the IRS anyway), and not accepting for audit? That
seems more backward than even I'd expect the IRS to be.

The link you sent doesn't seem to back up your claim that paper records are
required. As far as I can read, it simply states that if you keep records
digitally that they must be kept to certain standards. Those standards seem in
line with the initial submission standards.

It then references 97-22.

~~~
rada
From IRS perspective, your filings are taken on faith, while during an audit,
you are expected to have records to back up those filings.

Perhaps this article will explain my previous link more clearly:

[http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/04/02/afraid-of-an-
audit-...](http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/04/02/afraid-of-an-audit-how-
long-you-should-keep-tax-records/)

~~~
ydant
Yes, records, but not _paper_ records. Your latest link again reinforces the
idea that you can keep scanned copies. Earlier it seemed like your point was
you shouldn't scan/destroy tax records because you need paper copies in an
audit. I don't see anything that agrees with that.

I keep paper copies of my tax filings because it's easy enough to do. I'm just
not seeing where, if my digitals never disappear, I _need_ those paper copies
to comply with the law.

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

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visural
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.

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imp
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.

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MadQA
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.

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aaroneous
ScanSnap S1300 and Mariner's Paperless (osx)

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BigEd781
A box. A big box.

~~~
sjs382
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.

