Mindful order

At the end of last year, I decided to join the people who pick a word or phrase for the year, instead of setting resolutions. My phrase was Mindful Order.

Order because there are some areas of my life that are less organized than I would like, and the disorder causes me persistent low-level stress.

Mindful because if I get too focused on order, I can overreact to things like socks left on the kitchen stool. (When the kids were younger, I used to dream of moving to someplace warm enough for the kids to wear sandals all year long so we could eliminate socks entirely.)

I wanted to remind myself that often (always?), choosing to play Settlers of Catan on a Saturday afternoon is a better use of time than organizing a cabinet.

Over the winter, I focused on getting all the loose photos into the photo albums and made some progress on consolidating some investment accounts to give me fewer things to keep an eye on.

The last two weeks, I've started reducing the amount of paperwork we have filed. Depending on how you look at it, I am either very good or very bad at keeping papers. The paperwork is organized. With rare exceptions, I can put my hands on the piece of paper I need in a matter of minutes. But I am very bad at letting go of papers.

In our current house, this isn't that big of a deal, because we have plenty of storage, but as we look ahead to downsizing (either this summer or next), I know I'd be happier with less paper to store.

So I've begun switching us to electronic statements on various accounts. Frankly, I should have done this years ago.

We unfortunately need to keep a lot of records because of tax deductions (my husband is self-employed and works from home), but I've been downloading as many as I can still get online and backing them up, and then shredding the paper copies.

And there are a lot of papers we don't need to keep at all. (For example, statements of benefits from health care visits 9 years and three insurance companies ago.)

I'm currently very fond of 1) my shredder and 2) curbside recycling.