This can easily be streamlined to consume little time by:
- Realizing that whenever you need to extract some old document in the future for reference / proof, you'll likely have a date range when it happened to go looking for it. And needing something old happens rarely enough that the overhead of searching for it can be neglected, so you'll layout your binders to make putting things away fast, not searching things. And the older things become the less likely it is that you'll ever need them again. So sorting by date is important.
- Thus realizing that any finished documents can go to a SINGLE binder which is sorted by date, you don't need a separate one for healthcare, utilities, whatever. You don't even need registers in the binder, just flat date sorting.
- Therefore, you'll only be having 3 binders:
"ToDo", "Done" and "Constantly needed" (the latter is for contracts for example).
Sort the contents of "ToDo" and "Done" by date. Adding new paper will be quick because new stuff arrives close to the most recent date so you don't have to search a lot for the place to insert it at.
AND: Make sure to mark the date on every document with a highlighter of always the same color so you can easily spot the dates when inserting.
TL;DR: Most documents will go to a single or two sorted-by-date places, just like your email inbox. This makes adding things fast.
Thanks for sharing your approach: I do like the fact you are optimizing for "putting away things".
The amount of documentation you have (and have to go back to) is probably on an entirely different scale to what I am personally dealing with: this would never work for me, since just a date would make finding stuff almost impossible.
I put a lot of thought into this system so it's nice to know someone at least took notice of it!
Your problem of larger scale may or may not be alleviated by the details I left out for simplicity and because I assumed a typical reader may have a low scale:
- In practice my "ToDo" and "Constantly needed" folders do have registers such as "health care" etc. as those are the ones where I usually have to search for things. The date sorting there is inside the registers. For "ToDo" I also color-code the registers by priority and sort them by priority.
- The "Done" folders have a register for each year. For very high scale you might add registers for month. The folders are also labeled on the outside with their years. To make it easy to access things which you might have to go back to, you could add "look here!" registers which do not affect the date-sorting, i.e. like bookmarks.
Maybe it's not just the scale, but how much I can remember of when something happened: monthly registers would require me to search a number of them for a bunch of reasons as I might not be sure exactly when something happened, making it impractical.
- Realizing that whenever you need to extract some old document in the future for reference / proof, you'll likely have a date range when it happened to go looking for it. And needing something old happens rarely enough that the overhead of searching for it can be neglected, so you'll layout your binders to make putting things away fast, not searching things. And the older things become the less likely it is that you'll ever need them again. So sorting by date is important.
- Thus realizing that any finished documents can go to a SINGLE binder which is sorted by date, you don't need a separate one for healthcare, utilities, whatever. You don't even need registers in the binder, just flat date sorting.
- Therefore, you'll only be having 3 binders:
"ToDo", "Done" and "Constantly needed" (the latter is for contracts for example).
Sort the contents of "ToDo" and "Done" by date. Adding new paper will be quick because new stuff arrives close to the most recent date so you don't have to search a lot for the place to insert it at.
AND: Make sure to mark the date on every document with a highlighter of always the same color so you can easily spot the dates when inserting.
TL;DR: Most documents will go to a single or two sorted-by-date places, just like your email inbox. This makes adding things fast.