uncluttering one day and one thing at a time

How goes the uncluttering, this fine Wednesday?

I've managed to find yet another source of paper that should already have been thrown out - the filing cabinet. Today, I discovered a folder of primary school newsletters, dating back who knows how many years (I didn't look, I just checked that the whole folder was newsletters and chucked the lot). I've pulled three other files out to go through, and I suspect that several others could be thinned as well. Possibly, by the end of this I'll be able to fit all the extra bits of paper in the cabinet!

Sometimes, for me, uncluttering isn't so much about getting rid of things (although that can be a great side effect) but about dealing with something that annoys me. So, this morning, I've just spent a productive 5-10 minutes sorting through my scrap paper pile, and I feel so much more relaxed about it that I did.

As a household with three kids, one of whom is through high school, and the other two still in high school, we've generated a lot of 'unused' paper through the last decade -- mostly half used scrapbooks and note books. We have a shelf that this gets put on, and then any time anyone needs to make notes or doodles, they grab paper out of there. However, there are different 'grades' of such paper, depending on how easy it is to get more/the proportion of it in the stack. And every time I see one of the kids grab some of the coloured construction paper (which means I usually can't read the notes), the heavier card stock, the graph/manuscript/dotted thirds lines paper, I take a moment to go 'don't use that, use the real scrap paper'. And mostly they do, but sometimes they just grab what is on top. And when what is on top is what has just come out of someone's desk drawer, it could be anything.

The sorting was pretty simple. I took the top 15-20cm off the pile (of ~30cm), and then anything I didn't care about that was roughly A4 sized went straight back on. Coloured paper and construction card were put in one pile; all the other 'precious' paper types in another, and scrap that was smaller than A4 was either sorted into a notepad pile or binned. The 'precious' papers have been put at the other end of the shelf (vertically, between existing dividers), and the small note pads have been put on top, so that they can be used first. Random bits of card, covers off scrapbooks, pieces too small, all in the bin.

And now I have a neat and tidy shelf, and I know that if I grab the top piece of paper off the active pile, it will be something I can throw out after I've used it, because it really is scrap.