June and her Paperwork Mountain

Clare doesn't just help people clear their clutter.

She can help you focus on a specific type of clutter which can be particularly useful if you’ve already done the clearing, sorting and categorising of the general clutter and now need help to organise and store what’s left.

June was one of the 17% of our top tip subscribers who say that most of their clutter contains paperwork,
so when she called us to ask for help Clare wasn't surprised by anything she had to tell her.

The trouble with paperwork is that it seems to continuously grow before your very eyes…….. it comes in almost daily with the post. There’s always bills, bank statements, marketing, free papers, charity envelopes, take away flyers, and unless we have a way of keeping up with it all, the mountain is bound to grow.

As Clare says: paperwork can be small in volume, large in quantity. After all, a 500 piece reem of paper from the stationary shop may take up a relatively small amount of space, yet it takes a long time to read through and make decisions on 500 separate items.

June fitted our classic criteria for someone who had paperwork clutter out of control, so she booked a 6 week Help in the Home Package not only to de-clutter the backlog of clutter, but also to have enough ongoing help to work through her paperwork clutter and get it under control.

June knew that she needed to de-clutter ALL her clutter before concentrating just on the paperwork clutter.

Clare and June had the pre-home visit telephone consultation and June was ready when Clare arrived for the 2 day home visit.

Clare started working with June by doing the preparation work – working through a couple of exercises with June to see why she had so much paperwork, where it was coming from, and where the problem in her ‘clutter cycle’ was. Clare knows that when people have clutter that’s out of control then there’s a stage of the clutter cycle missing, so we just needed to find out what was missing and find a solution that suited June, her home, lifestyle and way of working (which is unique for everyone).

Once Clare and June had identified the root of the problem they got to work categorising the paperwork into it’s sub-categories. As with all clutter, you can’t decide how to store it until you know how much you need to store, so this was an important step in the process.

They then spent the rest of the 2 days of the home visit doing the organising, identifying suitable storage solutions, and deciding what processes and procedures would work best for June in the future to keep it under control.

The de-clutter support days and telephone coaching after the 2 day home visit was spent dealing with other types of clutter AND the control of the paperwork clutter.

As with all paperwork, it’s not a ‘one hit wonder’ clutter clearing session as paperwork comes into our home every day, so we need a process and procedure which will help us keep on top of it. June then used the 6 weeks of follow up to adjust and tweak the processes and procedures that had been devised on the day of the home consultation as she was able to see how they worked in practice.

As June told Clare:

I can’t believe how simple you made it, and I realised that I’d been worrying too much about how to store and organise my paperwork before I even knew how much I needed to keep.

You helped me to take a step back, not be overwhelmed by it, take it a week at a time and most importantly accept that it doesn’t have to be perfect first time.

It was as if you were holding my hand at every step and now I wonder what all the fuss was about!

I know it’s sad, but there’s something great about being able to find your passport or last bank statement in an instant!