Paper mocking- what is the deal??

The amount of paper out our house can just get out of hand. The mail box just won’t stop generating it, the kids backpacks regurgitate it all over the kitchen table every afternoon, my desk seems to reproduce it and let’s not even talk about my husbands desk! Or maybe let’s… I’ve never seen a person balance paper stacks that high in my life, not real life anyway, he took those cartoons with the stacks of paper to the ceiling, VERY seriously.

All we ever hear about is “go green” this, “conserve” that, yet the paper just never stops coming. I try to keep up with it but inevitably I get busy taking care of other business and it starts happening…. the stacks begin to build. Don’t think you can let the paper actually start to touch each other… that’s when things get really out of hand. The next thing you know the paper is mocking you… snickering as you walk past it, watching as you start to twitch because it’s all so important and if you throw it away you might just end up elbow deep in the garbage can searching for it at 3am.

I categorize it, shred it, stack it, file it, burn it, recycle it, store it and it just keeps coming back.

With all of the e-statements and electronic billpay-ability, it appears as a society we are trying to reduce the paper mockery, but somehow just can’t live without it. Until a time when it’s all plastic card waving, retina scans and video advertising it’s gonna be us vs. the paper.

Here is a couple of things we do to minimize the paper snickering -

1) The one touch rule – paper comes home and goes direcly to it’s home (most of the time) which could be anything from the filing cabinet, the bill holder, the circular file or the kids “I wouldn’t dream of throwing this away bins.” That way it doesn’t go from the desk to the kitchen counter to the table and back to the desk again. Believe me it helps!

2) Each of our kids has a trey for their papers so we can get through our “oh so busy week” without things getting spread all over the house. On the weekend we go through the trey with the kids and throw some away, keep some for re-use (ie.) if you’ve only used one side and it’s not a keeper, keep a stack of it and use the backside for scratch paper or doodling. Do I see a little green happenin’?

TKMom

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 7:08 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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