Organising Your Paperwork

The amount of post coming through UK letter boxes has doubled in the last 20 years, and it is thought that approximately 2 million e-mails are sent every second (with about 75% of those being spam). As e-mail and land addresses are increasingly traded between companies, unsolicited offers and catalogues threaten to swamp the items we genuinely want to read or keep - and they eat into our time.

You may not want your home to feel like an office, but you can still usefully apply business systems to incoming mail and accumulated paperwork: make a firm decision on every item as soon as you can, store only what you have good reason to keep, and be ruthless in what you throw away.

In this section, you can find out how to keep on top of your paperwork, with advice on creating a filing system and other ideas for storage. There's also some handy hints on keeping important documents and paperwork secure.