New Year, New Filing System
I’ve been editing forever. Seriously. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t editing. So when I finally sent the last of Hiro II off to the marvelous Erin Zarro for copyediting? It was time for a celebration. It was time for some fun, and time to accomplish some of the stuff I’ve been putting off while editing forever. So I did some dishes. Enforced the taking down of the Christmas tree. Took a friend to lunch. Rearranged my files. I’ve been meaning to do it for YEARS. Why Sunday was finally the day? I couldn’t tell you. But I did it. I already had five different colors of file folders. I also had the same five colors of hanging files, coincidentally enough! So I dove in. Stuff that’s personal to me, I filed in blue folders. “Certificates.” “School Stuff.” “TDP.” For my daughter (who creates a TON of paperwork with every step, holy smokes) red. Labels include “Health,” “School,” and “Trouble.” Things owned like the car, the house, appliance manuals, receipts–those are in yellow. Pet paperwork, general family stuff, that’s orange. Then the financial stuff, naturally, is in green. Taxes, pay stubs, aaaallll that stuff that comes up… At the very front of the top drawer, in easy reach from my desk, I have six files labeled for the months. January/July, February/August, and so on. Those are my “I don’t know what to do with this, do I need to do anything with it?” files. So instead of letting…