You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (39 page)

Paper Pile Management

As a child, do you remember longing for the mail carrier to deliver a letter with your name on it? We do. Were we nuts? Didn’t we know that mail has the uncanny capability of multiplying when we’re not looking? Well, at least that’s how it feels.

Figuring out what to do with the paperwork is a source of aggravation and confusion. We can sort our belongings and cancel
magazines and newspapers, but the paperwork keeps arriving in our mailboxes!

As soon as you order from one mail-order catalog, you’re quickly deluged with catalogs from other companies who have purchased your name and address. Mail order can be a great way for an ADDer to shop. Eliminating the distractions of other shoppers and rows of items to choose among can be a relief. The disadvantage is
finding a place to put the four or five catalogs that find their way to your house every day.

Mail isn’t the only source of paperwork. After a day of errands, you may arrive home with a large pile of bank slips, store invoices and credit card receipts. You also accumulate miscellaneous reminders that you’ve written for yourself. It doesn’t take more than a day or two for a mountain of papers
to have grown on your counter. To deal with Paper Pile Management you need a plan.

Use Your Planning Notebook Again:
Every day when the mail arrives, jot down the things you receive. For a week or so, put all accumulated receipts and pieces of paper in a box. At the end of the week, go through your pile and add each item to your list. At the end of this process, you should have a reasonable idea
of your paperwork inventory.

Categorize Your Paper Pileup:
Your next job is to divide your general list into small, more manageable parts. For now, you might want to start out with two large, relatively easy-to-use categories:
Trash
and
Things to Keep
.

Divide a second sheet of paper in half and put everything from your master list in one of these categories. You might prefer to dump out your
box and physically put everything in the proper pile. If you agonize over trashing versus keeping, you might want to start a third pile for
Maybes
.

Whether or not you realize it, you’ve just begun to create order out of paperwork disorder. You’re working with a plan and that’s what organization is.

The only category you need to be concerned about is your Things to Keep. Things to trash should
already be in your garbage can. If you can’t do without your third category of Maybes, put that paperwork aside for now and don’t use it during the next step of fine-tuning. Although your pile may not look much like a filing system yet, it will soon.

Sort your list into two smaller groups or make two piles on the floor:
Things to Do
and
Things to File
. Put anything that you need to act on, such
as bills, in the “to do” category. Put everything else in the “file” category.

As you continue this sorting process, keep in mind your needs and lifestyle and those of your family. The book club mailing may interest you, but be honest: Is there any way you’ll have time to read any of the books you might order? If the book club uses a system of automatically sending selections, are you prepared
to keep track of the deadlines and deal with the extra paperwork? As you make decisions to discard some of these things, you can significantly reduce the quantity of paperwork.

Set aside your entire “to do” file for right now. To keep track of these current and pending items, you’ll need to design a system for easy, automatic access. We’ll talk later about managing these important “hot” folders.
For now, focus only on your “to file” pile—the paperwork you seldom need to access. We’ll start with this part of your filing system because it’s more easily managed than your daily paperwork.

At this point, you should feel less anxious about the Paper Pile Management you’ve pared down in size. So, get out some file folders and sort the papers in your “to file” pile into subgroups. We can’t tell
you specifically how to organize these because it will depend on the kind of paperwork you handle. But you might try using general categories of
House and Financial
, plus
Personal
and
Spouse
. The key is to keep your groups simple and broad. Although there will be some overlap, sorting according to these categories will be fairly straightforward.

Cardinal Rule #1: Use Your Filing System
Regularly and Consistently

Should you set up your files alphabetically or by type? Again, we can’t tell you how to arrange them because there isn’t a right or wrong way to do it. But we can offer two guidelines. First, regardless of the system you design, you must use it regularly and consistently. We know we’ve already said this, but it warrants repeating.

Cardinal Rule #2: Keep It Simple

Don’t be tempted
to be too organized. For example, you’ll probably want to keep records of home improvements and related items in your Home/Financial file. You could keep separate folders for each item—carpeting, appliances, lawn care equipment, electronics, etcetera. If you fine-tune your divisions too much, though, your system will become too complicated. It would probably be better to group these related items
in one or two folders. Since it’s a good idea to keep records of home improvements for tax purposes when you sell your house, you might want to keep these separate. But keep other home-related records together in one folder.

Cardinal Rule #3:
Meet with Your Paperwork at Scheduled Times

After you finish sorting, labeling folders and filing every piece of paper, immediately make a decision about
when
you will file
your incoming mail and paperwork. Check your schedule and pencil in an appointment to
meet with your paperwork
on an ongoing basis. If you don’t make a specific plan to do this, you’ll experience the perplexing phenomenon of the Plague of Paperwork—it spreads and multiplies with astonishing speed and disastrous results!

Cardinal Rule #4: Always Handle
Your Paperwork in the Same Place

Successful organization depends on thoughtful planning and a routine. Make a habit of always handling your paperwork in your office space. Avoid opening your mail on the kitchen counter, in the front hall or on the run. Take incoming mail and miscellaneous paperwork to the place you’ve chosen to work. If you flip through your mail when it arrives or open several pieces on your way out
the door, you will be greeted by a messy pile when you get home. You’ll begin to feel out of control again.

To-Do’s and Paper Pile
Mis
management

Now that you’ve taken care of your permanent filing system, it’s time to deal with the primary source of disorganization—your “to do” pile. This is where problems of time management intersect and often collide with those of Mess Management.

To deal
with the confusion of this paperwork, assign an importance factor to every piece of paper. Use the degree of urgency to separate the paperwork in your “to do” file: important—must act on now; important—must act on sometime soon; important—pending a response; may be important; unimportant. If you’ve already made judicious use of your trash can, you shouldn’t have many unimportant pieces of paper left.

As you do this sorting, use some kind of marking system to track how long and how many times you’ve been shuffling the same piece of paper. For example, you could date-stamp each piece of paper every time you handle it. This serves two purposes.
First, it will document the date of receipt of the paper. Second, it will prompt you to make some decisions.

If your piece of paper becomes wallpapered
in date stamps, it’s been handled too much! Maybe it’s time to schedule a special date to get the job finished and out of your “to do” pile. Maybe it’s time to question whether the job should be on your list at all. Weeding your flower garden may be something you really need to do, but the weeds won’t get any shorter as the days go by. Hire a neighborhood child to do the weeding for you so you
can get the job off your list and onto hers!

Make a Decision About Storage and Access:
Now you have to figure out where to put this important paperwork so you can quickly access it. Many organization experts say that you should put it in a “hot” folder in the file cabinet. We’re not so sure this is a great idea for an ADDer. Putting something away in a file can be akin to burying it in the yard
under eight feet of dirt! Once it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. You can’t take action on it and you can’t retrieve it.

If you
need to see it to do it
, you may have to come up with some alternatives to the file cabinet. Perhaps one of these suggestions will work for you.

Bulletin Board:
Consider hanging a bulletin board. Divide it in four sections to match your
importance
categories. Instead
of residing in the depths of your file cabinet or taking up residence over the expanse of your desktop, your pending notes and messages can be readily seen and accessed. Hang your bulletin board at eye level to act as a visual prompt.

In/Out Baskets:
If you have sufficient space on your desktop, try using four baskets. Use three as
In
baskets for your Important/ Now, Important/Soon and Maybe
Important paperwork. The fourth, your
Pending
basket, is for your Already Done/Waiting for Response paperwork. Put a label on each to remind you what the basket is for.

Desktop File:
Without question, a file cabinet is useful. It efficiently stores a lot of paperwork and keeps office clutter to a minimum. It would be a great system if only it didn’t
hide
everything!

Keeping papers sorted in
piles might work—at least until a gust of wind sends them floating through the air. Since piles aren’t particularly efficient, the next best thing is a desktop file. Although keeping files in plain view might not look neat, it can help you keep better track of your important and pending paperwork. It has the added advantage of being portable so you can move it off your desk to provide extra work space.
If you don’t have room on your desktop for a file box, buy one that hangs over the top of a drawer.

If your files are at your fingertips, you’ll be more inclined to put your paperwork away before it accumulates. Having to walk across the room to a filing cabinet may be too much trouble!

Personal Yellow Pages:
You might be using your permanent files for business cards or flyers of services or
stores you’ll need some time in the future. Although this kind of information shouldn’t be with your “to do” paperwork, it probably shouldn’t be stored in your filing cabinet either. A more useful system might be to set up a Personal Yellow Pages Directory. It might be a good idea to list your entries alphabetically by service rather than by name. When you need to call John Alverstraton, the carpenter
who fixed your porch steps, you may not be able to remember his name. It’s a lot easier to find him under “C” for carpenters.

Cues, Prompts, Memory
and Mess/Paper Pile Management

Mess and Paper Pile Management is largely dependent on the components of attention and memory. To be better organized, you will need to work at your system and attend to the details of the task. Moreover, you need to
REMEMBER what to do with the details. Do the following scenes look familiar?

You spend an entire afternoon clearing off, straightening up and filing away piles of paperwork. You look around your space and feel quite proud of yourself because you have efficiently filed everything in its proper place.

Fade to the same place, one week later

You confidently begin your scheduled chores of sorting
and filing, secure in the knowledge that your great system will work again. You open the first letter and begin to feel uneasy. What should you do with this response to the inquiry you wrote last week? And just where did you put your copy of that inquiry? Did it go in the “to do” file or the “pending” file? With increasing anxiety, you scan your files trying to recapture the systematic process you
designed last week. Much to your dismay, you realize that you don’t have a clue how to begin …

Many ADDers find that this perplexing scenario repeats itself time and again. Our response to the dilemma is often to design yet
another
new system! We don’t really need a better system—we need a better memory. Let’s consider how Memory and Mess/Paper Pile Management can work together in our war on
disorganization. In the following chapter, we’ll look at other issues of memory management.

Regardless of the degree of your disorganization, when you want an ice cube, you go to the freezer and get one—assuming you remembered to refill the tray the last time you emptied it! When you want to put your hands on your car title, however, your search may be considerably more convoluted. Although you
probably won’t look in the freezer for it, you might look in many other places!

You know where the ice cubes are because you repeatedly access them from the same storage place. The car title is an entirely different matter because the possible storage places are innumerable. Did you file it alphabetically by name? Did you file it under your Personal file, Spouse file or in the Home file?
Did
you file it in your “hot” file because you knew you would need it soon?

Put Your Planning Notebook to Work Again:
To prevent the panic of filing system blackouts, you may need to keep a running list of the contents of both your current and permanent files. Make a dated outline of your files, jotting down the contents of every folder. Be sure to update your list anytime you make changes to your
folders. If you need to see it to do it, your list will be the next best thing to having your files physically spread around you in plain view. If you’d rather take the time to sit and memorize the location of every paper, we suppose that would work! Somehow we think you probably have more pressing things to do with your time.