I developed it initially for myself and use it at home, and I think it's a good general-purpose system for anybody. However beyond its general applicability, it is a system that is particularly optimized for use by people with depression or other energy-depleting or decision-impairing conditions.
Now, no system of filing is spoon-free; I don't claim that this system will make filing easy for someone who has a clinical impairment. I will venture merely that this will make it more possible.
This post is incredibly long. That is not because this system is complicated, but because I was very, very thorough and specific, to leave nothing to the imagination, and because at places I explain why. (Free psychology inside!) It looks worse than it actually is. It's actually pretty simple – indeed, in places it will strike some as scandalously so. Writing this document took me something like 20x to 30x the time it took me to actually just do the described annual maintenance.
Table of Contents
About Decision Impairments, Depression, and Using This System
Some Underlying Technical Principles
The Principle of Speedbumps
Requirements (Ingredients)
Preparing for Initialization: Some Notes and Cautions
Instructions for Initialization
Instructions for Regular Use
• The Principles of Usage
– FILE IN FRONT – FILE IT ALL – FILE IT FIRST – NO VISUAL ALERTS – WRITE THE PAYMENT ON THE BILL
• The Decision Tree (We Make 'Em, So You Don't Have To)
• A Note about IMPORTANT
Instructions for Ongoing Maintenance
Instructions for Annual Maintenance
Digitalization
Expansibility
Final Words
About Decision Impairments, Depression, and Using This System
(If you are unconcerned about the applicability of this system for people with impairments, you can skip ahead to the next section.)
One important thing about Major Depressive Disorder that most people don't know – and, frankly, that includes too many mental health professionals – is that indecision is an official symptom of a Major Depressive Episode. People in depressive episodes often have the symptom of being impaired in their ability to make decisions. With this symptom, every decision, even trivial ones ("what do I want to eat?" being a classic), feels overwhelmingly difficult to make, like lifting a boulder with one's mind. Decision fatigue affects all people, but for people with this symptom it kicks in much faster.
The non-obvious thing about filing is that by default it's approximately 99% making decisions, of the sort "what should I do with this piece of paper?", and 1% labeling folders. As such it's very hard for someone with that impairment.
So this system attempts to eliminate as much decision-making as possible.
Which brings me to an important point. I am not the boss of you. This is not the one true and only filing system. You are more than welcome to take this system and use it as a point of departure for developing your own system, and customize it to your heart's content. But if you have depression or other decision-making impairing condition, you will get more value out of this if you don't do that.
In fact, if indecision is a facet of your medical condition, and if it therefore is useful and easing for you to eliminate unnecessary decisions as a form of spoon conservation, the way to eliminate the most unnecessary decisions in starting a filing system is to adopt one, such as this, wholesale, just as it's set forth. So if you have depression or other decision-impairing condition, it is my recommendation, to get the maximum utility out of the system, that you treat it like the word of god.
Think of it this way: there is a recognition in software that "turn-key" is a desireable trait for a system to have, so that the new user isn't asked to make a ton of technical configuration details before they've even had a chance to use the system and find out how they like things. Likewise, the idea of "sensible defaults" in software, so you can install it and have a reasonable hope it works without having to pass a trivia test about the machine it's being installed on first. This is an attempt at a turn-key filing system with sensible defaults.
And in the same way, nothing about this system locks you in to not adapting it later. You'll have all the opportunity in the world to customize it later.
Because here's the thing. One of the things I've noticed working with people with MDD and their filing systems – including this filing system – is that they often make a couple characteristic cognitive mistakes when trying to implement filing.
1) Penny-wise and pound foolish – Quite literally, I've seen people with depression self-sabotage their efforts to get organized, whether with filing systems or other things, by insisting on systems which require unnecessary future effort, in compensation for not using adequate tools and materials for reasons of cost. When effort is something very dear to you that you have to ration, choosing to make up with a "bit" of extra effort down the road for, say, not having enough file folders to do the job right ("I'll just put them together in here; it won't be that hard to keep them straight in my head") is typically enough to scuttle the whole enterprise.
This system costs money. Well, maybe you can find a way to source the materials without cash outlay. Definitely be creative about sourcing. But convincing yourself that you can do this without the necessary tools and materials just dooms the whole thing: it increases all the problem-solving and decision-making you have to do, both in the start, and, typically, on an ongoing basis.
2) Poor judgment – Similar to the above, I've seen people with depression set themselves up on unnecessary yak-shaves in the name of optimizing for something that is not helpful – for instance, making sure a filing system is total enough to handle everything in their lives, by design, right from the start. "I'm going to need hanging folders in six colors, so I can't start until I find a vendor who makes variety packs in six colors. I've only been able to find packs of five." These systems never get off the drawing board.
This system presents you with a way to set aside your own judgment, and get something up and running without getting side-tracked. You can then expand upon it later, but this actually gets you to where you're reducing your problem-pile. But to get that benefit, you have to accept it in replacement of your own judgment, and not let your own judgment send you into the woods.
Some Underlying Technical Principles
(This section is written for people who speak database. If you are unconcerned with database performance, you can skip ahead to the next section.)
The Siderea Filing System is optimized for a different value set than is typical for filing systems. It is my considered professional opinion that most personal filing systems are too optimized for retrieval at the expense of writing, for use by, well, humans, but most especially by people who have impairments of decision-making (see previous section).
(As a personal note, I find this amusingly ironic, as one of my soap-box issues in web development is that too many developers of web 2.0 systems don't do enough to optimize retrieval, and you can totally let writing take forever.)
This system corrects for that by being what we in the database trade refer to as write optimized. That is, it optimizes for how expeditiously one can put things into it correctly.
Well, comparatively so: it's a very modest trade off of a very small amount of read optimization (i.e. retrieval of things from it) for very high write optimization. Except that that's talking about the actual storage operations. In reality, the seek times on resources which never make it into the storage unit in the first place do, of course, approach infinity. So optimizing for write actually radically improves actual read performance, especially under load.
The Principle of Speedbumps
Speedbumps are things that slow you down. This system attempts to expedite filing by eradicating as many speedbumps as possible.
People with depression are often impaired, for a variety of reasons, at noticing, identifying, and eradicating speedbumps. Because depression is so damn frustrating to have, there is an emotional tendency to dismiss speedbumps under the felt sense of "I should be able to do this despite the speedbumps; I'm not going to remove this speedbump, I'm just going to try harder so I get over it like (I imagine) someone without depression."
The Siderea Filing System is based on the considered principle of oh bugger that for a lark. Ain't nobody got time for that. Removing speedbumps is good design sense and, as Apple more or less exists to prove, is a viable business model, for all users. It is also how people do great and weighty things with their lives:
This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. [...] You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. "You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits," he said. "I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make." He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one's ability to make further decisions. It's why shopping is so exhausting. "You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can't be going through the day distracted by trivia."That's Barack Hussein Obama, explaining to a Vanity Fair Reporter how to president.
So I will call out things that you might be tempted to inject into the system that are speedbumps. Take speedbumps very seriously, and do everything you can to eliminate them. Especially if you are working with limited resources of concentration or energy. If you have chronic low energy, it takes only a couple speedbumps to render your system inoperable.
(Of course, if you enjoy going over speedbumps for recreational purposes, more power to you.)
Requirements (Ingredients)
• 1 pack (25+ct) "Manila" file folders (default: tri-cut)
• 1 pack (25+ct) hanging folders (default: varicolored)
• 1+ file cabinet or file box, separated in two (each ~4 or 5in of linear drawer space) (default: Two-drawer file cabinet; cheaper alternative two of these boxes)
• 1 pen (any; I'm partial to these for ease of writing, but they're unnecessarily spendy)
• 1 writing surface (desk or table recommended)
Preparing for Initialization: Some Notes and Cautions
• You need to find a place in your home for your file containers. If you opt for the file cabinet (recommended) it should be placed near a work surface and a chair. The ideal situation is next to a desk, such that you can access it without getting up or moving away from the desk.
• If you opt for two portable file boxes, you will need to decide where to store them. Some place they are readily accessible is better than in a closet with things heaped on them. Speedbump: having to clear off the filing container before you can put things in the filing container.
• Do not attempt to substitute one big box for two smaller boxes or a two-drawer file cabinet, unless you have a permanent place to set the box from which you can use it (put things into and take things out of it, even from the back most part of it) without moving it. A single file box will be very heavy when you are done. Speedbump: having to move a heavy thing into and out of position for use. Dividing the load into two boxes makes the whole enterprise at least feasible, but, again because of the requirement of moving things to use them (smaller speedbump), is less good than a file cabinet positioned conveniently and never moved.
• Cardboard boxes of any variety are speedbumps, due to their poor support of hanging files – both literally and figuratively.
• There is no such thing as a too-cheap manila folder so long as it is actually uncolored. Very cheap colored manila folders can rub off dye onto your documents.
• Low-end hanging folders tear apart, and the hanging rods tear out under load and become perfectly useless very quickly. It is worth it to pay for a brand reputable for durability. Smead is well-reviewed at Office Depot; I am partial to Pendaflex, which are as close to indestructible as something paper can be.
• If you are someone for whom writing is physically uncomfortable, choosing a pen which makes writing less uncomfortable (e.g. easier to grip, right level of resistance on the paper) reduces a speedbump, and is worth the money. I hear you can also use a label maker (a hand-held device that you type into and which emits labels on an ad hoc basis) but am unfamiliar with the technology. Printing labels from your computer onto sheet labels is a speedbump, if they have to be prepared in batches of whole sheets at once. Any method of generating labels that isn't one at a time, which involves planning ahead for future labels while you make one, is a speedbump.
• Any pen which needs to be fussed with, filled, sharpened, etc to use is a speedbump and should be eliminated in favor of something which always just works.
• NO CALLIGRAPHY. Speedbump.
Instructions for Initialization
Est. time, 10min.
1) Mentally designate one of the two file-storage spaces as for your filing system (default: upper drawer) and the other for storing raw materials (default: lower drawer).
2) Open the box of hanging folders, and reserve the little bag of label cardstock and clear plastic tabs.
3) Put all the hanging files into the raw materials storage.
4) Open the box of Manila file folders. If necessary collate (sort) the folders into a "left, center, right" tab pattern.
5) Put all the collated folders into the first hanging folder in the raw materials storage.
6) Open the little bag that came with the hanging folders, and remove a length of label cardstock. Detach four label cards both from the whole and each other.
5) Label them (substitute the correct calendar year for your space-time coordinates):
2015 - Work
2015 - Bills
2015 - Banking
2015 - Health
Put each label in a tab. These will be your four "chronological" hanging folders.
6) The very first time you initialize this system, also detach a fifth label card, and label it
IMPORTANT
and put it in a tab. Make this label visually distinct from the others. If you have a colored tab to use, you can do that; if you have a highlighter marker, you can do that; or you can just put stars to either side of the label text: ** IMPORTANT **.
7) Select hanging folders from your raw materials storage to go with these labels you've prepared. If you have a choice of colors, the four for your chronological hanging folder should all be of the same color (default: blue), and the one for your IMPORTANT file should be different from them.
Put the tabs on the folders, staggering their positions.
Put these folders in your filing system, with the IMPORTANT folder in front of the others.
8) Then put the packet of tabs and labels in the raw materials storage, in front of the hanging folder that is holding your unused manila folders. Now your first hanging folder in the raw materials storage has your manila folders and your blank tabs and unused labels for your hanging folders. If you stick a good folder-labeling pen in there, you'll have all your resources for folder-making in one place.
9) Now each of the four chronological hanging folders you have labeled as per above needs to be populated with a set of manila folders, as specified below. (The IMPORTANT hanging folder is not pre-populated with manila folders, so don't worry about it yet.) In making all labels, take your time and write simply and clearly.
Hanging folder 2015 - Work:
• Employers/Pay sources – For each job for which you receive pay stubs right now, label one folder with the name of the employer and the year. For instance, if you work for LiveJournal, you could label the folder LJ - 2015. Note: if during the course of the year, you gain another employment/work based income stream, add a new folder for it.
• Taxes – Label a folder Taxes - 2015. Put it behind the other manila folders in this hanging folder; the tax folder(s) should always be the last folder(s) in the 2015 - Work hanging folder. The order of the other folders doesn't matter. Please note, if you are reading this in January, have to pay US taxes, and have never done anything like this, also make one labeled Taxes - 2014, and put it in there too, to capture the paperwork that is delivered in January for the previous year.
• If you make charitable donations: Label a folder Charitable Donations - 2015. Put before the tax folder(s).
Hanging folder 2015 - Bills:
In this hanging folder you will put a manila folder for each bill you regularly receive, except health insurance.
• Make a folder for each utility you are billed for, labeled in the Utility Company - 2015 format. Utilities you are likely to have include: electricity, gas, cable, water, telephone. Not sure what all utilities you have? Don't worry! Write the ones you do know about, and then as you discover others later, add them. The system is very amenable to building out as you go.
• Make folders for any other service or good you are contracted to receive on an ongoing basis for which you are billed more frequently than annually, e.g. Milk delivery - 2015.
• For insurance policies, make a separate folder for each policy (e.g. Liberty, Car Insurance - 2015 and Liberty, Renters Insurance - 2015) unless you get a single consolidated bill for all your policies. Do not include health insurance (see 2015 - Health below.) For properties (real estate, vehicles, mailboxes, etc) you rent or make payments on, make a separate folder for each property. If you are having trouble remembering who all your suppliers are, you can check your checkbook and/or bank and/or credit card statement, but, again, don't let it be a speedbump; you can always add folders later. Note: do not include financial instruments, see below 2015 - Banking.
• For magazine or similar subscriptions for which you are billed annually or biannually, designate a single manila folder, Subscriptions - 2015.
Hanging folder 2015 - Banking:
• Bank accounts - Make a folder for each bank account you have. The principle here is to make one folder for each series of statements. If you have multiple accounts on a single consolidated statement, make a single folder for them, while if you get separate statements for each of your accounts at a single bank, make separate files for each. Label each folder in the format of either Bank Name, cd - 2015, where cd is a code: sv = savings, ck = checking, ba = bank account. Invent new reasonable codes as necessary and appropriate. Example: Citizens, ck - 2015, for a checking account at Citizens or EBSB, ba - 2015 for joint accounts at East Boston Savings Bank.
• Credit cards and loans - Make a folder for each credit card you have. Label them in the format of Lending Institution, cc - 2015. Make a folder for each loan you have. Label them by what the loan is for, e.g. School loan - 2015. Important: note that this means you both have a checking account and a credit card at the same bank, you will have two different folders, one for each. Never, ever combine the records for a line of credit with a bank account.
• Investment accounts including retirement accounts - Make a folder for each account or investment.
Hanging folder 2015 - Health:
Because the paperwork for healthcare can be particularly copious, it is separated out into its own hanging folder. It has four basic folders:
• Health CARE receipts & bills - 2015
• Health INS receipts & bills - 2015
• Health INS other - 2015
• Health RX & Info - 2015
If you have additional, separate policies, for instance for dental care insurance, add them, e.g.
• Dental INS receipts & bills - 2015
• Dental INS other - 2015
The usage of these folders will be discussed below.
Instructions for Regular Use
The Principles of Usage
• The Principle of FILE IN FRONT: In all cases, always put the next incoming document/item in the front of the folder; your folders will thus be a reverse chronological record of your relationship with each of these institutions or accounts or issues.
• The Principle of FILE IT ALL: If some bill or statement or solicitation or other correspondence that comes to you in the mail comes with random other pieces of paper? Coupons, policy changes, terms changes, price statements, etc? FILE IT ALL. Major speedbump: attempting to decide whether or not to keep or pitch each piece of paper. DON'T THINK, JUST FILE.
Seriously: nobody wins a prize for Purest Filing System. There will be no point in your life where you'll ever think, "Thank goodness I carefully threw all that irrelevant paperwork away before it besmirched my filing system." But there is a non-zero chance that if you throw something away, you'll want it later. You're actually reasonably likely to find yourself going, "Ah crap, didn't I see something about that in with the electric bill...? Did I throw that out?"
So simply FILE IT ALL, sticking the most recent stuff in the front of the manila file. Reduce your decision-making to zero, and forfend losing (what subsequently turned out to be) important documents. You'll have a complete and chronological record of everything you were sent by that entity, in one handy, readable package.
And it if matters enough to you to not store things you can get away with not storing, very well: make a date with yourself to go back at some other date, when you're not filing, and prune your folders' contents. But DO NOT make keep/pitch decision-making a precondition of getting things filed. Default to FILE IT ALL, and then garbage collect later, if you have the spare spoons.
• The Principle of FILE IT FIRST. Documents that need some sort of processing – for instance, you'll be using your tax documents to do your taxes; for another, you might need to use bank statements to balance your check book – should be stored in their envelopes if not yet processed. That is, file the document still in its envelope – you can open it to look at it, but then stuff it all back in the envelope – until you process it, then throw away the envelope and file it open.
This allows you to have your cake and eat it too: you can file things you aren't ready to deal with (e.g. haven't received all your tax documents, so can't start your taxes; don't have the spoons at the moment to balance checkbook) without losing track of the fact you haven't dealt with them.
Speedbump: most people only use their filing system for completed paperwork. This makes processing incoming documents a precondition on putting paperwork into the system. That has two unfortunate consequences: (1) it makes a bottleneck (speedbump) in the filing process, and (2) it means that the documents you most need not to lose (unprocessed ones) are the ones not in the system that exists to make documents easy to find – the paperwork you expose to loss are the most important paperwork not to lose! Also damage: you're less likely to spill coffee on paperwork that's filed away than sitting out on your kitchen counter, dining room table, coffee table, etc.
It is easier to file it first, and then pull the document from the file for processing when you're ready to, than it is to leave the documents wherever and then try to wrangle free-range documents floating around your home when you finally need them.
• The Principle of NO VISUAL ALERTS: The thing that causes many people to balk at the principle of FILE IT FIRST is that they believe they need to leave their paperwork out as a visual reminder to do to it whatever they need to (e.g. pay a bill).
This is a terrible practice. If it is true that you need reminders to do bill-paying and other paperwork processing chores – and many people do, no shame in that – those reminders should not be unfiled paperwork lying around. There are so many reasons why this is a bad idea, I probably can't capture them all, but here are a few:
– If a bill lying out is a visual reminder to pay the bill, how good a reminder is it if you visually obscure it by stacking other bills (and other things) on top of it? Using paper-lying-around as a visual reminder works terribly to actually remind you, because it eventually gets visually occluded by other papers, and other things.
– If a bill lying around to serves as a reminder, it is a constant reminder, at all times, not only at times you can do something about it. In so far as it is a reminder, it is like a fire alarm chirping that its battery is running out, every hour, for days. It sends the visual signal you're keeping it out for, every time you see it. This is a constant low grade distraction from anything else you wanted to do, and a constant low grade irritation, slightly degrading your quality of life.
– Worse, because it is a constant signal, you do to it what you do to any other boy-who-cries-wolf alerts: you learn to tune them out. So the bill stops actually working as any sort of prompt to action. Your eyes skate right on over it without registering, "Oh, right, I was supposed to do something about that."
– If you are having any sort of emotional difficulty around processing your mail – if you expect bad news, if you're ashamed of financial difficulties, if it includes reminders of bad things, if it taxes you emotionally in any way – then having it out is also a constant source of reminder of those bad feelings. If you avoid your bills because they bring up shame for you, leaving them out to goad yourself into dealing with them is self-punitive: it's like having a little radioactive pile of shame on your desk. All you'll achieve is conditioning yourself to avoid the place you put them.
– It being a slowly ever growing pile of shame, as you deposit more and more unprocessed paperwork on it, in no way, shape, or form makes it better.
– This whole notion of how a reminder works is based on the idea that by having a visual reminder out, at some point you'll see it and feel like doing it. That's very different than having a regularly scheduled time to do the task.
What's the alternative? I know of two: get something to beep at you, or peg it to the calendar - or both.
– Get something to beep at you: add it to your schedule on whatever device(s) you keep your schedule on. Set an alert, that goes off at some reasonable time. Make it an auto-repeating thing once a month. Relatedly, some banks' online bill-pay service has a feature where instead of auto-paying a bill, will email a reminder to log in and pay it. There are reminder services, such as ohdontforget.com, which will send you a text message reminder that you set up in advance.
– Peg it to the calendar: If you simply keep the protocol of paying all your bills on the Nth day of the month, and the calendar itself – if you can be expected to know what day it is – becomes your reminder. "Oh, it's the 25th. Time to do the bills."
– In both cases, instead of just a reminder that the bills need paying, consider scheduling the paying of bills, the same way you'd block out a span of time in your schedule for a doctor's appointment. In other words, stop thinking of bill paying as a milestone, and start making it an appointment with yourself – and that's what you set the reminder for.
• The Principle of Write the Payment on the Bill: When somebody sends you a piece of paper saying to pay them, and you do, keep the piece of paper (everything except the detachable part you send with the money) and (1) circle the place on bill where it says what you owe, and write prominently on the bill (2) the date you paid it, (3) the amount you paid (if you paid in full, write paid in full), and (4) the means by which you paid (e.g. check, Visa, bank transfer, cash), e.g. "Paid $200 by check 1/5/2015". Make it big and legible. If you use a means of payment which gives you (5) a transaction number, write that too. If you got a paper receipt, e.g. paying cash at a grocery store service counter, (6) staple it to the bill.
Having done this, each of your folders of bills is now also a record of payments, and a much more convenient one than reading back through your check book or online bank account payment history. If a utility company or other service says they didn't receive your payment, you can see at a glance how much the most recent one was and when you sent it.
The Decision Tree (We Make 'Em, So You Don't Have To)
Given a Thing-in-Need-of-Filing, follow this decision tree:
- Is it a tax document? For instance the W-2s, 1099-MISCs, and other IRS forms your receive from employers and investments. Also, the 1040EZ or other tax booklets you get sent. Also, hard copy of any completed tax forms you are in the process of preparing, or have submitted.
- Yes: File in 2015 - Work / Taxes - 2014 (i.e. in the folder for the previous year). Use the envelope trick, and when you are ready to do your taxes, there they all are waiting for you.
- Is it to do with a paycheck or other money you earned?
- Yes: Every payment you receive for work you did, put the pay-stub or similar statement in the folder for the corresponding employer/payer, 2015 - Work / employer - 2015. If you're depositing live checks, you might want to keep the receipt for depositing the check, and staple it to the pay stub before filing (in case your bank disavows all knowledge of the deposit.)
In any circumstances that you need to demonstrate your income with your last N pay stubs, they will be the N pay stubs right on top. - Is it a document regarding your relationship with an employer? For instance an offer letter or contract of employment? Descriptions of benes or time off policies? Org charts or employee directories?
- Yes: Put it in 2015 - Work / employer - 2015 with the paystubs from that employer.
- Is it something to do with a charitable donations? For instance, a solicitation for a donation?
- Yes: If you either made the donation or want to make the donation, file it in 2015 - Work / Charitable Donations - 2015. Use the envelope trick for unpaid solicitations. Once paid, don't forget to Write the Payment on the Bill.
- Is it a statement from a bank or investment instrument? Or other correspondence from an institution regarding an account with a bank or investment institution?
- Yes: file it in the corresponding folder in the 2015 - Banking hanging folder. If it requires some form of reconciliation, use the envelope trick. Also remember to File It All.
- Does it have anything to do with health care?
- Yes: It belongs somewhere in the 2015 - Health hanging folder.
- Is it information about your health or medications that a doctor or pharmacist or other medical professional gave you? Like test results or the thing the pharmacy staples to your bag of pills?
- Yes: File it in Health RX & Info - 2015. Remember: FILE IT ALL. Every time you see the doctor or dentist or get a prescription filled, you are probably given documents: test results, privacy policies, follow-up instructions, exercise routines, info sheets on medications. By sticking it all in one place, this folder is now a consolidated record of your health care, including all your medications. Could be extremely useful if you have a medical crisis (have the folder brought to the hospital!) or suddenly need to check, "Hey, could this be a side effect of this med I've been on for a while?"
- Is it information about from a doctor's practice, like a privacy policy or a coupon for a fitness club?
- Yes: File it in Health RX & Info - 2015. Remember: FILE IT ALL.
- It is a bill from your health insurance? (Not from a doctor or hospital, but from an insurance company?)
- Yes: File it in Health INS receipts & bills - 2015. Envelope, WtPotB.
- It is something from your health insurance company that looks just like a bill, but has prominently printed on it "THIS IS NOT A BILL"? I.e. is it an Explanation of Benefits (EOB)?
- Yes: File it in Health INS receipts & bills - 2015. If you like to review these, envelope.
- It is a bill for health care, like a bill for a doctor's visit, a hospital stay, physical therapy, etc?
- Yes: File it in Health CARE receipts & bills - 2015. Envelope, WtPotB. Note that your written notes of paying these bills may be all the record you ever have of, what, precisely your payment was for. It could be all the legal proof you ever have that the moneys you spent were for legitimate tax deductable medical expenses, which, should tragedy befall and the amounts get large, and if you attempt to deduct them on your taxes and get audited, could be wicked important. They are effectively receipts, which is why you're putting them in a folder with receipts. See also the next item.
- Is it a receipt for health care you paid for, like the copay when you visit your doctor?
- Yes: File it in Health CARE receipts & bills - 2015. Every time you pay a co-pay or out of pocket for medical care or supplies – for instance at doctor's visits, or for a prescription – stick the receipt in the Health CARE receipts - 2015 folder. At the end of the year, you'll have all the receipts necessary to deduct that expense on your taxes, all in one handy place.
- Is it a document about your health insurance plan, like a policy, or a description of services covered, or a directory of doctors, or a letter about your eligibility?
- Yes: File it in Health INS other - 2015. For health insurance alone, separate folders are kept for bills/EOBs and for all other documents. Health insurance companies – and now the exchanges themselves – can generate a lot of paperwork, so it can be useful to keep payment records separate from the rest. The bill payments may be tax deductable, so having them separate may be useful at tax-filing season; having them intermixed with every health-tips newsletter and policy document from your insurance company makes them hard to use, but you want to save that stuff too. So separate folders.
[End of the health-care branch.]
- Is it a bill (not previously accounted for)?
- Yes:
- Is it a bill for a magazine or other subscription you pay for a year or more at a time?
- Yes: File it in 2015 - Bills / Subscriptions - 2015. Envelope, WtPotB.
- It is a bill for a credit card or loan?
- Yes: File it in the 2015 - Banking hanging folder in the folder for the associated line of credit. Envelope, WtPotB.
- Is it a bill for any other service or good you contract to receive, or for fees on a property you own?
- Yes: File it in the 2015 - Bills hanging folder in the folder for that service from that vendor.
- Is it a document about a company that bills you regularly? Like a notice of interruption of service or an update on the terms of service?
- Yes: File it in the 2015 - Bills hanging folder in the folder for that service from that vendor, right in with the bills.
[End of bill related branch.] - Is it a very important document which concerns life or death, whether your own or that of anyone else? For instance: wills, living wills, professional wills, powers of attorney, health care proxy documents, birth certificates, death certificates, coroner's reports, marriage certificates?
- Yes: It belongs in the hanging folder IMPORTANT, and you will have to label a new manila folder for it.
- No: It is none of the above?
• Either: does it have someplace obvious in the system? Put it there.
• Or: it's going to need a folder, so you need to make one for it.
A Note About IMPORTANT
Some people feel that the IMPORTANT files should be in a fire-proof box or safe, or a safe deposit box outside the home. Those are reasonable things to do. However, if you are new to being organized, you may first want to get the IMPORTANT hanging folder system going. Do not let optimizing file safety be a speedbump in getting organized; you can always move IMPORTANT later to a more secure container or location.
Instructions for Ongoing Maintenance
• If a company you do business with changes its name, you can cross out (single line only) the old name and write the new name on the folder tab. But its important that you can continue to read the old name; don't cover it up. So if you used to be a Cingular customer but then found yourself an ATT customer, your label would read
• If you stop doing business with one company in favor of doing business with another – changing cell phone companies, e.g. – make a new folder for the new company. Separate folders for separate companies. So if you were an ATT customer but ended your contract and signed with Verizon, you'd have one folder ATT - 2015 and another folder Verizon - 2015.
• If you start a new business relationship with any entity – a new employer, a new investment instrument, a new bank, etc – create a new folder for it.
• If you have multiple accounts with a single business, have multiple corresponding folders for it, unless all the paperwork is consolidated. If you open another account with a business you previously had a single account with (e.g. getting an IMMA account to go with your checking account) you must both start a new folder for the new account and update the old folder's name to differentiate it from the new account.
• If you end a business relationship, do nothing to the folder. You may find yourself in receipt of paperwork about that relationship later on – whether you find it behind your couch or the business finds it behind theirs – that you'll need to file.
Instructions for Annual Maintenance
• Every year, at the end of the year (default: Dec 26), you need to make a fresh batch of chronological files for the coming year.
If using colored hanging folders, pick a different color hanging folder for next year. Default: the next color in the rainbow that is represented in your collection of hanging folders. (The next color after purple is red, though you can stick grey and brown in there if you have them.)
Go through the initialization process described above, using only accounts/businesses which are active.
Put the new year's hanging folders in front of the old year's hanging folders (another application of FILE IN FRONT), but behind IMPORTANT.
Take the tax folder from the previous year and move it into the current year's YYYY - Work hanging folder. Because you do your 2014 taxes in 2015, the "current" taxes you're working on are actually last year's; it avoids confusion if the taxes you're working on "now" are in the current year hanging folder. Put last year's tax folder in the very back of the new year's YYYY - Work hanging folder, and you'll always find it easily and reduce confusion.
• Once you've done this for seven years, in the eighth year, you can retire the oldest set of chronological files. And by "retire", I mean "shred". That is, save the last seven years' records, and then destroy anything older than that unless you have some reason to save it (e.g. save anything that proves you own a property, or which pertains to an ongoing law suit).
If seven years of files is more space than you have in your filing system drawer or box, you will need an additional longer-term storage container for your archive. This is an okay application for those cardboard bankers boxes.
Try to keep the current year and the two previous years on hand. The rest can go into an archive box, someplace safe, cool, and dry to store.
So once a year, if you need space for your new year's files, you'll need to haul that the archive box out, and move the oldest year's files in your filing system into the archive box. At that time, if the archive in the storage box goes more than seven years back, and if you have the spoons, you can also remove the out-dated files. HOWEVER...
Note that this retirement process is not urgent or even important; if you don't have the spoons, just create the new year's system, and let the old ones pile up. Get to them when you can/want to. Having 20 years of well-organized files in several tidy boxes in an attic is not actually any form of problem. If and when you (or someone designated by you) decides to go through them to dispose of things, you'll find everything incredibly easy to deal with because it's well organized and contrained.
Do not let purging old files become a precondition of initializing your new year's files. Speedbump. Better to just set up another banker's box as an archive and shove them in there.
Should you decide to purge old files, you can shred just the contents, and re-use the actual manila and hanging folders, if they're still in good shape. Don't bother trying to use crumpled, broken, torn, or otherwise damaged materials; that's a speedbump. You can get label stickers to cover over the writing on manila folder labels, so you can label them anew. Trying to read labels that have been scribbled out and re-written on is a speedbump during regular usage.
• The IMPORTANT hanging file is never retired, itself. If you wish to reduce its volume or make space for files more regularly accessed, you might pull some of the files in the IMPORTANT folder which though important are not regularly used (e.g. death certificates years after the death), and put them in some sort of storage box.
There should never be more than two containers of IMPORTANT files: one active IMPORTANT hanging folder in your filing system, and one archive of old IMPORTANT files. That way, you will be able to know conclusively that you've looked through all the IMPORTANT documents by searching in only two places, and if you have to pack up to evacuate your home in a hurry, you only have to grab two things.
Digitalization
Everything I've written here can also be adapted to digital filing systems, however it does require some changes. For instance, paper filing systems can express chronology organically through the FILE IN FRONT process; you actually have to be scrupulous about putting dates in filenames when saving digital records (the system datestamp has nothing to do with the date the document pertains to!), and doing it in a rigorous and consistent way (YYYY-MM-DD at the beginning of the filename is a favorite of mine.)
A discussion of digital asset management is beyond the scope of this document. Have fun storming that castle.
If you are doing some of your payments and record keeping digitally, the question arises of what needs to be printed out.
The answer is: anything that is legal evidence that you:
• Own property or assets
• Have a legal right to do what you did
The first is somewhat obvious: if a document proves you own your house, keep it in hardcopy. Relatedly, if it proves you paid the mortgage payments which are a precondition of your continuing to owning your house, maybe you want that in hard-copy, too.
The second includes any sort of lease or rental agreement – things that demonstrate you had the right of usage of a property – and anything that demonstrates that what you're declaring on your taxes is legitimate for you to do so. Because if what's between you and the IRS falling on your head is your records... maybe you want them in a format that can't crash.
In other words – this is the more general principle – save anything in hard copy the loss of which might be legally bad, because it exposes you to legal risk, or which you anticipate you're going to have to present to a third party as evidence. In that latter circumstance, you're going to have to print a bunch of stuff out, if you didn't store it in hard copy.
Expansibility
This system is highly expansible. If some aspect of your life isn't covered by the system as described, you can expand the system to cover it.
For instance, I'm the sole proprietor of a business; I run pretty much the same system, in parallel with my personal one, for my business financial paperwork.
This system is most obviously organized around chronological paperwork: documenting your relationship with other business entities over time. You can use the principles explained throughout this document to extend this system to cover any other sorts of chronological relationship.
If, however, you wish to capture non-chronological paperwork, you'll have to have a non-chronological addition to the system like the IMPORTANT folder. An example of non-chronological paperwork you might want to capture is that which comes with home electronics, such as manuals and user guide. If you own a remote for your TV for 10 years, the instructions that came with it will be as pertinent in the 10th year as in the first, and having to remember what year you got the TV to find the instructions for the remote is a speedbump.
In evaluating whether or not something is chronological, you're really asking whether the document's most relevant aspect for recall is when it is from. If you wish to have a system for filing, say, newspaper clippings, it might be tempting to store them in chronological order – but that will only work well if when you want to pull a specific article, you will be able to remember when it is from. (This actually works for me for certain types of documents – sheet music from gigs! – but is not the way to bet for most sheet music, nor for most newspaper clippings.)
Final Words
The Siderea Filing System is the product of 25+ years development. Which is to say, I've been slowly figuring out all the above by screwing it up one way or another and then figuring out how to fix what wasn't working for about a quarter century. It works really well now, but along the way, I've gotten just about everything on this list wrong at least once. Yea, verily, I am the voice of experience.
Though I can't acknowledge them by name, I'd like to give at least anonymous credit to my patients, who assisted me, in some cases unwittingly, as I helped them work on their own filing problems, in figuring out how to explain how this system works and why it needs to work like this. A particular shout-out to the one who, after a year of my assisting her with her filing her way, showed up in my office with a new file box and a pack of folders, and announced, "FINE. Let's try it your way"; and then, as I tried to teach her this system, fought me every step of the way. She's using about 75% of the system, now, successfully as best I can tell.
That concludes, I hope, the documentation on Siderea Filing System. If you have questions about implementation or expansibility, you're welcome to try asking them in the comments below. I've consumed a lot of arm writing this, and am not sure what my availability will be for responding. Perhaps you all could help one another. Please, for the love of all that's holy, please, please use the Comment Catcher if you aren't capturing the post in email.
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