Drowning in Paperwork

I have hated being sick this week. Not that anyone ever likes being sick, but I have just been so frustrated this week because I haven't been able to get anything done. Normally I wouldn't care as much, but I was supposed to leave tomorrow to drive to Florida to visit family. I've pushed that back until Sunday, but I was already going to have to "get ahead" on my list for January in order to get everything done while being out of town. It has been hard for me to not get ANYTHING done for a week. My house is a complete wreck. I hope my energy levels are back to normal tomorrow so that I can just go into full on cleaning mode!

Last night I finally tackled sorting through and organizing all the paperwork in our house. It was something I could do while sitting on the floor and didn't require any energy. This is the first house we have ever lived in where the guest room doesn't have to double as an office. We have a separate office... which I will love... eventually. Right now, it's just being used for storage of random things. You know it's bad when your 3rd grade neighbor comes over and points out "My Dad uses that room for is office. I can tell that you just use it for storage." Yes, very true. Or when your 3 year old neighbor is over and asks you "but, why is it so messy?" Point taken. In my defense, we have no office furniture, and thus, no motivation to clean it out. It's going to be a little while before we can afford to get that room set up. In the mean time, I have NO filing method for all of the paperwork that comes through here. It stresses me out. The general pattern has been that it piles up on the counter, or table, and then we have company over and I move the pile someplace else to sort through later. That place has mostly been an empty dresser in our bedroom. Yes, this is embarassing, but I had 3 dresser drawers full of paperwork. Most of which was able to be thrown away last night. The rest I sorted into piles and will put it all in file folders tonight. When we get the office set up, I need to get a good file system going. I should probably get some file boxes for hanging folders before we can get the office set up and establish a good system now. I think my husband would agree that paperwork issue in our house is definitely a frustrating problem.

I dream of one day having a well organized home office and great system for taking care of household papers. I need to put some thought into what that system is going to be. It feels good to be making progress for sure, but sometimes it's frustrating to not be able to just get everything done NOW! I guess that's the point of this whole project though. Progress a little bit at a time is better than nothing at all, right?