Each month, the average U.S. household receives 80 pieces of junk mail, three magazines, six catalogs, and 10 credit card solicitations. When you add receipts, articles clipped from magazines, and ATM slips, it’s no wonder that piles of paper are as common in our homes as furniture!
Many of my clients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can’t seem to keep up with paper clutter at home and at work. Maybe our children’s children will have their reading material stored in tiny nanocomputers. For now, this system can help you gain control over those stacks of paper:
1. See each piece of paper as an action to take.
Sort everything into three categories:
Toss: Anything that can be thrown out or recycled immediately.
File:
Tax records,
medical forms, and all other papers for your filing system.
Action: Anything that necessitates a phone call or an e-mail, that must be given to someone else, that requires faxing, that requires a signature, that pertains to an ongoing project, and so on.
Sort quickly, and don’t agonize over your decisions. It may help to ask a friend or family member to work alongside you.
2. Tackle your Action pile.
It can be a challenge to figure out what to do with the papers in your Action pile. Don’t panic, PANEC!
PANEC stands for Paper-Action-Next Encounter. Take each piece of paper in the Action pile and write on it the very next action that is needed. On a page ripped from a catalog, you might write, “Order by June 1;” on an article about cars, write “Give to Bobby.” Then put them in the Next Encounter locations—the catalog page goes by the phone; the article for your son goes on his bed. You can either do one paper at a time or take a stack of them and distribute around the house all at once, whatever works for you.
PANEC works for ADDers because it reduces the uncertainty about what to do with each paper. Just make sure not to cycle papers endlessly. If you move a document more than twice, your call-to-action phrase probably isn’t specific enough—or maybe you need more information to decide what action to take.
Depending on how many papers you have, digging out might take one morning or several days. Once your paper-handling system is in place, you’ll be able to keep paper clutter to a minimum.
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