I'm delighted to welcome Lisa Woodruff back to The Productive Woman to talk with me about how we can conquer paper clutter in our homes and offices, and how getting it all under control can increase our productivity and happiness.

The Paper Solution: eliminating paper clutter and taking control of our lives

Getting our papers organized and under control may seem like such a mundane thing, but it can make a big difference in your life. Knowing that your important papers are organized and in one place will reduce your stress and anxiety level. And with how hectic this year has been, this is one thing you can control.

Lisa Woodruff is a productivity and home organization expert who motivates and teaches busy women to take back control of their lives with functional systems that work. She's the founder and CEO of Organize 365® and is the host of the top-rated podcast by that same name, where she shares strategies for reducing the overwhelm, clearing the mental clutter, and living a productive and organized life. She has authored several Amazon bestselling books and is a sought-after trainer and speaker. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with her family. She was our guest way back in January 2017 (TPW122), but since then she’s written a new book that offers solutions to a problem I think a lot of us face: paper clutter. 

It began with the Sunday Basket system

The Sunday Basket is a system Lisa developed over time that allows you to do away with to-do lists, rid your countertops of paper clutter, and get everything that's on your mind onto index cards. It's a way to free up each day from living in a reactive mode by instead proactively planning each Sunday and doing as much as you can in a 90-minute session. If you can't complete it all in 90 minutes, then it can be deferred to the next Sunday. Lisa has found that people who use the Sunday Basket system save, on average, 5 hours every week, within six weeks after they start using the system.

The Paper Solution

Lisa just published a book called The Paper Solution. She decided to write this book because she couldn't find any books on paper organization, either because the trend is to digitize everything or to rely on color-coded file cabinets, or because organizing paper is just plain hard. (I had the privilege of reading The Paper Solution ahead of its release and immediately asked Lisa to come back to TPW to talk to us about dealing with paper clutter. I highly recommend this book!)

Lisa found that although the Sunday Basket system worked for people, they couldn't maintain the color-coded file cabinet system. When papers go into the file cabinets, they seldom come out. Lisa realized she needed to create categories of paper so people know which papers go into which categories, and then teach them a better to organize those.

Lisa came up with the idea of using binders instead of file cabinets, so that the papers could be portable, and could be taken to lawyers' offices, your doctor's office,  or outside in case you need to quickly evacuate your home.

Once we get papers out of the file cabinets and into binders, Lisa says, we realize how many of those papers we can actually get rid of. 

How to reduce paper coming into our homes and workplaces

We as a society have been talking about a paper-free workplace and home for decades,