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Comment by sithadmin | Hacker News Reader

>For Ms. Kondo’s instruction on sorting papers is perhaps the most liberating of all her maxims: Just throw them all away.... >“There is nothing more annoying than papers,” she says firmly. “After all, they will never spark joy, no matter how carefully you keep them.”

Strongly agree with this. Scanning every document I owned, then discarding the originals (save for things like my birth certificate, social security card, etc.) was one of the most liberating things I have ever done.

Now, I scan every piece of paper I have collected over a month, then shred and recycle.

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I have had great success with a small filing box, perhaps the size of a backpack. I toss half-important documents in there (vehicle service records, key receipts, contracts) and forget about them.

Every couple of years I spend ten minutes flipping through. Documents that are laughably obsolete are promptly tossed, and the box goes back into the back of the closet.

Perhaps an important circumstance is how little paper I deal with, though. There is no temptation to file all my bank records, for example, because they are already all electronic.

Completely agreed. I picked up a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 [1] a few years ago and got rid of probably a foot stack of paper in total. It works wonders at eliminating that existential hopelessness too much clutter sometimes brings.

[1] The scanner works very well on linux and OS X, and has had very few jams no matter what I throw at it. http://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-Instant-Sheet-Fed-Sca...

What do you do with old tax returns?

I dunno about others, but I use TaxACT to file my taxes and it spits out a PDF of my full return. My W2s are delivered as PDFs through my employer's internal site. Everything else (student loan interest, investments, etc) is downloadable. The only tax document that doesn't come electronically is the mortgage interest statement from my (crappy) servicer so I scan it and shred it. Hopefully that gets fixed next year when I refinance.

Ah, I see. My taxes are complicated enough to require a CPA, which means I get a thick envelope full of papers back from him that I promptly stick in a box and hope never to look at again. (Until recently when I started working on thr mortgage preapproval process.)

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