A Taxonomy for all the Papers in My Life

Thanks to the one serious page in The CollegeHumor Guide To College (page 29—“Things to Take with You to College”), I’ve been using a filing box and hanging file folders since my first day of college, sixteen years ago. At first I only had folders for each class I had, to keep all my syllabi and homework and handouts.

But then I graduated college (and kept all those papers because I am overly sentimental) and discovered having a filing system makes sense for pretty much every piece of paper you get in your life that you don’t immediately recycle. For years I kept getting more and more IRIS Weathertight storage boxes each time I filled one up with folders. I never really had a plan as to how to organize all the folders, what their names should be, etc. It all evolved organically over the years.

A few months ago I had the idea that maybe I should get one of those big metal filing cabinets and put it in my closet to help house all the new papers I’d be accumulating for the next fifty years (if I’m lucky). Then I took a step back and had a galaxy brain moment. Instead of putting more shit in my house, what if I reduced the amount of shit by scanning all the paper I have, recycling or shredding it, and keeping it in the cloud ☁️?

In comes the Brother ADS-1250W, a fast document scanner that can OCR documents as you scan them and turn them into searchable PDFs. They go straight into my iCloud drive, and now wherever I am I can whip out my iPhone and search for a question from my sixth-grade English homework:

Question: What worries you?
Answer: N/A

True story.

A filing taxonomy that works for me

The problem still remains that since my filing system developed ad hoc over the years, it was in need of a rethink. After doing some light research on the Internet, I came up with the following categories to handle my existing papers:

• Banking
• Investments (retirement, brokerage accounts)
• Credit Cards (statements, policies)
• Government (IDs, birth and marriage certificates)
• Taxes
• Legal
• Healthcare (insurance, bills, records)
• Disability Insurance
• Life Insurance
• Car / Auto (insurance, maintenance, registrations)
• Home (mortgage, homeowner’s insurance, invoices for housework)
• Utilities
• Work (orientation papers, handbooks, resumes, applications, etc)
• School
• Daycare
• Receipts
• Product Manuals (often you can get these from the manufacturer’s website, so storing their PDFs might be better)
• Mementos (concert tickets, greeting cards, letters, etc—thing you probably still want to keep the paper versions of)

Since it is all digital, it’s easier to add subfolders to further organize. Add whatever subfolders make sense to you. And with the magic of OCR and a good file-naming convention (YYYYMMDD Title of Document [- Person’s Name].pdf), you can hopefully do a global search and find what you need without ever having to worry about what folder it’s in.

Welcome to adulthood.