If you follow me much, you know that during 2020 we decided to move out of Texas (and none too soon by the sounds of it) and back to Colorado, the state we love. We started out just moving into a rental while we got our house in Texas ready to sell. Then, just after the holidays, we bought a new home here and just last weekend finished the moving in and cleaning the rental, and all of that fun stuff. We are exhausted but happy to be in the new place and get settled again.

Now that my office is mostly unpacked, I found a huge stack of papers that just accumulated during the 6 months while living in a rental. We didn’t unpack everything while there so some things just couldn’t get filed properly. So, one of my jobs this week is to go through those papers and get them sorted, filed, or recycled. I will have a pile of things to scan as well and I will just put on some music and scan away until those are finished.

I also have a filing cabinet full of things that can probably be scanned and recycled or just recycled. There are some things that just don’t need to live in paper form if you file them in an organized way on your computer or in the cloud.

The biggest hurdle with getting organized is making the decisions. We, as humans, don’t like to make decisions. We like to know yes/no, right/wrong, good/bad, up/down, and so on. If we know what the “buckets” are, we know where to put the stuff. However, we get hung up on choosing the “buckets.” So, I have to decide what to keep, what to scan (and how to file it), and what to recycle.

I’m hoping to keep up with Cyndi Ingle‘s “Filing Fridays” on The Genealogy Squad group on Facebook, now that I’m in a permanent location!