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It’s one thing to decide to rid your­self of binders and papers that you no longer need, but a whole dif­fer­ent mat­ter entire­ly to deter­mine what is good rid­dance and what is not. 

What if we hap­pen to throw away some­thing we one day might need? 


Sure, you could go through the entire book­shelf thor­ough­ly binder by binder, tab by tab and sheet by sheet, but when do we actu­al­ly have time to do such a com­pre­hen­sive clean-up oth­er than in time we could oth­er­wise have been free and out of the office?


Today, you will learn a sim­ple tech­nique to effort­less­ly get an overview of what mate­r­i­al you are using and what you can throw away with­out think­ing twice about it. 


What is the problem?
Why even both­er clean­ing your shelves out? 


Well, the less good-to-have-mate­r­i­al you have, the eas­i­er it will be to find what you are look­ing for. If you have too much unnec­es­sary and unus­able good-to-have-mate­r­i­al, it will be quite a chal­lenge to find what you tru­ly need. 

Do this

1. Alright, the first thing you do is to flip all your binders upside down so that the upper edge of the binder is now touch­ing the shelf. They are still in the same posi­tion in the book­shelf, only upside down. 
   Anoth­er way to go about the first step, in case you pre­fer some­thing less dras­tic, more dis­crete and prac­ti­cal, is to tie a rub­ber band around each binder.
2. The next time you take a binder out and use it, put it back right-side-up (or remove the rub­ber band if you chose to do fol­low that pro­ce­dure instead).
3. A year from now, sim­ply get rid of the binders which are still up-side-down (or still have rub­ber bands around them). Either file them away or throw them away.

Remem­ber, you haven’t even touched them for a whole year. 

Look less

If you do this, it will be evi­dent what you use and what you do not use with­out hav­ing to set aside extra time to find this out. After clear­ing the unused binders out, it will be eas­i­er to find what you need and you will have more space to store new mate­r­i­al in with­out hav­ing to pur­chase anoth­er bookshelf. 

This way you will have more open space in your office which you can either leave free and emp­ty or fill with things that inspire you. 

What’s your way?

How do you make sure that you do not keep to much good-to-have-mate­r­i­al which might be both old and out­dat­ed? Please feel free to leave a com­ment to let me and oth­ers know.