Tips on Keeping Paperwork

Organizing Your Keepsake Paperwork

All of us have fun paperwork that we like to keep, but it can easily morph into piles of clutter. Here are a few suggestions for how to organize that paperwork, your time and even your money!

1) Greeting Cards Received

Greeting cards that are kept should be given a place of honor in order to make it worth your while to keep them on hand. Create a scrapbook just for cards or include cards with photos in other scrapbooks. Particularly special or beautiful cards might even be framed individually or in a shadow box with other memorabilia from the event. Cards with no significant event, but great images can be snipped into artistic shapes and used as tags for gifts.

2) Greeting Cards to Give

Keeping greeting cards on hand for upcoming or unexpected occasions is a great way to be prepared. Use an accordion file with labels for each type of card, so you can find all like-themes in the same space and choose exactly the right one for the occasion.

If you find that you have a tendency to forget to send cards on time for birthdays and other special occasions, organize your time by choosing all your cards at the beginning of the year and then clip them inside the appropriate calendar month. If a birthday falls within the first week of a month, be sure to clip the card inside the month prior so you get it in the mail on time. Organize your money by taking advantage of bulk card purchase deals during greeting card sales events. Watch for the ads and get all your cards for a fraction of the cost.

On occasion it can also be fun to keep a copy of cards or letters that you sent out. Creating a special binder for these items and choosing an annual time to read from it can help ensure the cards or letters don't just stack up in various files around the house. If you celebrate Christmas, you can put your annual Christmas newsletter into a binder year after year. Reading the newsletters before bed on Christmas Eve can be even more exciting that Clement C. Moore's `Twas the Night Before Christmas.

3) Recipes

Magazines, printouts from the holiday cookie exchange, or the odd, old index card stained with coffee or vanilla-- recipes come at us from all sides and are inevitably discovered three days after the special dinner when we thought they might come in handy. Grab a few inexpensive photo album books and make themed books of recipes you know you will use only on various occasions, i.e. Thanksgiving Sides and Dressings, or Entertaining Dips and Sauces, or even Favorite Family Dinners. Then slip in the appropriate index cards.

Organize your time by creating grocery lists for special occasions by looking through only one cookbook. By starting family favorite recipe books, you will realize how many recipes you have and love. You may even discover you don't need that $30 cookbook you've been eyeing.

If you haven't decided if you want to keep a recipe, give yourself a deadline. Try your recipes within two weeks of getting the recipe. Giving it priority will ensure you try it before it collects dust. If it doesn't make it into the dinner rotation by then, get rid of it!

4) Kids' Artwork

Just like greeting cards, children's artwork you wish to keep should be given a place of honor. And again, scrapbooking and frames are both great options. Because of the high production rate of artwork, the refrigerator is not always the best option. Set limits by purchasing three or four jawbreaker types of pants hangers and use them to hang the artwork on the wall.

New artwork can only be added to the wall by removing a previous piece. At that time make the decision if you will be framing or scrapbooking the piece. If not it can go, either in the mail to a relative, into a special storage box designated for this purpose, or in the trash if you feel it's not going to have extra special meaning to you later on.

I keep one medium-sized box for this purpose. When my daughter brings home something special from school or art class, I put it in this box. At the end of the year, I weed out the box and only keep the 4 to 5 extra special projects that I feel will be representative of what she was working on in any particular year.

You can also take a photo of your child surrounded by his or her projects. Then you can save the memory, but discard all the extra paper.