The blog

The fact that papers and doc­u­ments which are trash should be thrown away and that good-to-have-mate­r­i­al should be saved may sound obvious.

??How­ev­er, occa­sion­al­ly it’s not quite that simple. 

Some­times we’ve got notes from a meet­ing, a few receipts or oth­er mis­cel­la­neous notes which we prob­a­bly can throw in the trash, but we’re not quite sure we real­ly can yet. It’s unlike­ly, but we might still need them in the near future and then it would be nice to be able to retrieve them.??We need a retain­ing waste­bas­ket, a bin with a month’s delay giv­ing us the pos­si­bil­i­ty to regret the deci­sion to dis­pose of the waste.

Do this

1. Get your­self two styl­ish box­es which can be piled one on top of the oth­er, made of for exam­ple semi-trans­par­ent plas­tic. They need to pile neat­ly on top of each oth­er and not just one into the oth­er. Per­haps you need a lid between the box­es enabling one to be placed on top of the oth­er. You will find these types of box­es in office sup­ply stores with broad­er selections. 
2. Place one box on top of the other.
3. Throw your ​“prob­a­bly trash”-pieces of papers in the top box when you need to dis­pose of these.
4. When the top box is full, place it under the emp­ty box so that the emp­ty box is now on top.
5. Con­tin­ue to ​“semi-dis­pose” papers into the upper box.
6. When the top box is full as well, emp­ty the bot­tom box, which means go though it and per­ma­nent­ly throw the papers into the trash.
7. Put the (upper) full box at the bot­tom again and the emp­ty on top, and con­tin­ue this ​“semi-dis­pose” routine.?

This way you will get rid of the ​“prob­a­bly trash”-papers, but you will still have them around for a while, just in case you change your mind. How long they are retained depends on how much you ​“semi-dis­pose of”.

Dig­i­tal doc­u­ments in limbo

Go through the equiv­a­lent pro­ce­dure with your dig­i­tal doc­u­ments as well:

1. Cre­ate a new fold­er and name it ​“Prob­a­bly trash”, ​“the Com­post”, ​“the Attic” or some­thing clever that suits you.
2. In this fold­er, cre­ate two oth­er fold­ers named for exam­ple ​“One” and ​“Two”.
3. Stow away the files you want to throw away with a month’s delay in the fold­er ​“One”.
4. Add a recur­ring task in your to-do-list, that tells you to erase the files in fold­er ​“Two” and move the files in fold­er ​“One” over to fold­er ​“Two” every month.?

Now the prob­a­ble trash files will be in lim­bo for a month before they dis­ap­pear for good. Bet­ter safe than sorry.

How do you do it?

?What are your tricks to ensure that you only have the mate­r­i­al you need around you, nei­ther more nor less? 

Please leave a com­ment below.