As I get older, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to manage the seemingly constant influx of 'important' documents.
Fortunately, most documents are sent to me digitally, where I can easily file them on my computer and back them up.
For non-digital documents like auto lease paperwork, home-related legal documents, major bills that I want to keep around, etc, my filing system is incredibly poor. By 'poor', I mean: it takes far too long to find the document I'm looking for, it's difficult to decide where to file something, and it's too difficult to find things.
Every few years, we take a stab at reorganizing our files, but the lack of searchability and the other affordances of digital documents leaves me wanting more.
How do you organize your personal documents? Do you digitze them somehow? Do you have a great filing system? I want to know.
If I need to get an invoice from last december, I just lookup around this date in my stack.
Time spent to store information : 0 ; time spent to find something : a few minutes, once every other month.
Every five years, I take the bottom of the stack and file it in the cellar. And I come back from the cellar with 10 year old documents I can either trash (in my office secured bin) or keep in my filing box.
I also keep contracts (insurance, bank, ...) in this filing box.
Last thing : All documents that will be used for my tax returns (at least the equivalent of it in France) go in one folder. I will use it once a year then file this in the "taxes" box.