OMG, Missy is brilliant.

I wonder what she'd do if she met Randy?

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I need this SO BADLY.

Does this Missy miracle worker have a website or a way to get an estimate?

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I ran across this idea several years ago and implemented it immediately. It works wonderfully. I just keep a folder in a central location and as the bills and receipts come in I just shove 'em all in once place and then file them off. Then every 6 months I pull 6 months of files out the back and send them too the shredder (after removing anything that might be tax related, which I file under 1 folder for each year.)

I keep everything for 3 years and keep the tax related stuff for 7 (as per advice from tax person)

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Hmm... apparently, I'm in the wrong line of work. :-)

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Are you thinking "Oh, this is all so trivial, I could take people's money for telling them this stuff"? Before you dash off to design the business cards, consider in mind that we were/are nearly ideal clients: all occupants motivated for change, no pets, no kids, no waist-high drifts of newspapers or impassible rooms, no garbage rotting in the corners.

This is, shall we say, not always the case.

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Hmm. That file-by-month thing might be worth trying. Sometimes a fresh eye is worth an awful lot -- I find a lot of what stalls me out in organizing and filing is making decisions: how should I approach this, what is my best strategy for that, etc. Just having someone else pick a strategy and then following it would save an enormous amount of time, waffling, and wasted energy.

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So is this person coming back on July 1 to check to see how it all looks again? ;-)

I watch those home organizer shows from time to time on TV. The amount of money people spend on baskets and drawers and files and other pretty systems is just amazing. I think I'm lucky that Danny is a tosser rather than a keeper. It's always been difficult for me to toss things, but it works.

Danny's next goal in tossing is going through all the accumulated spices and seasonings we have. He SWEARS that some of them should probably be tossed after not being used for 15 years, but I dunno...

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Hell, she's coming back in a month. We ain't no-how finished.

No new baskets & files & pretty boxes until we winnow down what it is that actually needs to go in them. (Much as I love, love, love shopping at Storables or the Container Store.)

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This is great! I hope my hubby is reading this. When we moved into a smaller space, we were trying to get more organized and get more containers. We also need a system.

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There must be something about the new year. Our paper monster still bedevils us, but the basement is much better. We had a dumpster delivered on Friday, and filled it half full on Saturday -- plus a (small) carload to Goodwill. The cardboard boxes should have been recycled, but if we'd put them aside all momentum would have been lost! There were any amazing number of ancient software CDs.

Spices are relatively under control: as you buy a new one, write the date on the bottle with a Sharpie. With unambiguous evidence that the bottle really is 15 years old, it's much easier to toss it.

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Our difficulty is that we're both really good at devising systems. Different systems. For the same stuff.

Two specific (really trivial) items where we both have a strong feeling, but 180 degrees apart:

In a hanging file, does the label go at the front edge or back edge of the folder?

If you throw things into a folder in a semi-chronological fashion, does the newest stuff go at the front or the back?

And then there's the stuff that we have no idea how to correlate (let alone file) and that gives us actual headaches: medical transactions. One event (eg minor surgery) can generate bills from 3 - 4 providers. They send bills before the insurance comes in and then lower ones after the insurance pays. The insurance company sends Explanations of Benefits that are hard to match to the bills and that group a check-up for one of us with anaesthesia for the other of us (with the surgeon on a different EOB). And... ow! my head hurts.

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Ah. We refer to that whole category of disagreement as "Scroll Wars", from the early days of Mac development (Does/should moving the little box in the scroll bar move the text? Or the porthole through which you peer at the text?)

And for both of your examples, I can think of mental models of the world where each of them makes sense. Manila file folders have the label behind the contents. A box of 3x5 cards with dividers has the label in front of its related contents. Which of these does a hanging file more closely resemble?

I came around to the "newest on top" method in file folders after a very short time working in offices. But our folders at home sometimes revert to "newest at back" because of those very same label-tabs: riffle through the drawer, find desired folder, insert hand between label and contents, dump contribution into folder at that point. The physical object makes "newest at back" mechanically simpler than "newest on top".

I agree entirely on the medical front. For dental bills, I have a skinny reporter's notebook with one visit per page, and manually jot down the date, reason, cost, date & amt of insurance payment, etc, until I can finally note PAID.

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Thank you!

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Please, please post the URLs you mentioned to us in conversation of places that will responsibly recycle things like digital media and xmas lights.

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Arrgh -- I'm not getting the links formatted right. Anyway, it's

www.Greendisk.com, for all your technotrash (discs, tapes, their boxes...)

www.HolidayLED.com is accepting burnt-out xmas lights through JANUARY 31.

All I know about these places is what I've read of them on the web, but they sound responsible.

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