If you have magazines, newspaper articles, journals, bulletins, notes, quotes, any kind
of literature stacked up on horizontal surfaces around your house and you're saving these
things to one day read, this video is for you.
My name is Alejandra Costello, I'm an organizing coach, and in this video we are talking about
how to organize all these things so you can find them easily and actually be able to read
the things that you are saving.
So before we get started, if you have hundreds of magazines, thousands of magazines, instead
of focusing your time and energy on organizing all the things, a better idea is to focus
on letting go, to make space, to make your life easier.
Now I realize you may be holding onto these things because you don't want to miss out
on any important information that you may need some day.
If that is the case, I totally get it.
I totally understand.
I recently hosted a class on how to let go of clutter when you cannot let go.
And I share a very easy five step process for getting yourself to mentally, to emotionally
be able to detach from your physical possessions and eventually let go.
So I will put a link to that below if that interests you.
All right.
So the first thing is to gather all of your articles, all of your literature, anything
that you have printed out to one day read.
And I don't know about you, but sometimes I just put flags in magazines.
Like for example, here's a magazine, and just flag an article that you want to save.
So if you've already identified the article, go ahead and pull it out.
If you have not identified the article, then you kind of have to flip through and figure
out where the article is.
The next step is to take all of your articles, all of your literature and begin sorting by
high level category.
So I say high level category, because if you get too specific, you get too granular, you're
going to end up with so many different piles and it may feel overwhelming.
So just keep it high level.
So take the first article, figure out what it is, high level.
So this is, let's just say it's travel.
This looks like a recipe.
This is recipe.
This looks like health.
Now, now that I have like three categories and I have more sorting to do, now is a good
time to begin putting labels on your piles so you can eliminate any confusion.
Because once you have a lot of piles, it can be confusing.
So this we said was travel, so I'm just going to go ahead and write travel on a scrap sheet
of paper or a sticky note just like that.
And then this next one we said was recipes.
So just go ahead and write recipes.
Sticky note, scrap sheet of paper.
This is health.
There we go.
Now I can be nice and clear as I continue to sort.
All right, next thing.
Travel.
This looks like a recipe.
This is travel.
This is all travel.
Health, health, recipe, travel, recipe.
This was travel, health, travel, travel, recipe.
And as you're sorting, look for things you can get rid of.
Maybe there's like, you don't have interest in traveling to New Mexico anymore.
Get rid of the article, only want to save the best things.
Travel, health, health, health.
And if you feel like, "I don't want to let go of this, I want to consume the information
one day."
If you're watching this video, then you probably have access to the internet, which as we all
know is like a wealth of just free information.
So just have comfort in knowing that a lot of information you can find again.
All right, now that I've sorted by category, the very next step is to organize all of your
piles into a system.
And so that is what I'm going to share with you right now.
Here's how I've organized all of my articles to one day read into a binder.
So once you have all of your piles, what you can do is look at all the categories that
you came up with.
So when I did this for myself a couple of months ago, I looked at all my piles and I'm
like, "Wow.
The common denominator between all these articles is that they're all related to personal growth."
So spiritual growth, physical growth, mental growth, emotional growth.
And so what I did is I created a binder and I called it Growth right here, because that's
what they all had in common.
So it just made sense to call it growth.
So I found a one and a half inch binder to put all of the articles.
I would recommend looking for a binder that's like one to two inches in size.
Anything more than two inches is just too heavy.
I feel like the papers are hard to turn because the rings are so big.
So if you can stick to one to two inches, start with one binder instead of setting up
... Like if you have a bunch of articles, you don't want to set up like 10 binders.
Pick one binder.
If there's one category that you want to expand on, then maybe you set up a second binder,
but just err on the side of keeping the best, letting go of the rest.
All right, so I put scrapbook paper in the cover to personalize it, and then inside ... So
I found a set of 24 dividers, so I could put all the different categories inside here,
and I just went through and I labeled all of the tabs on the dividers with my high level
categories.
Some of them are more specific but I erred on the side of keeping it high level.
So now, behind each of these dividers is all of the articles, all of the printouts that
are related to that category.
Nice and easy to find.
And when I need to reference the information, I just come here, very simple.
In the front of the binder there's this gusseted binder pocket that's built into the binder
for anything small that doesn't have three rings.
If your binder does not have something like this, you could always add a gusseted binder
pocket just like this.
Again, for anything small.
You can also add sheet protectors for different size pieces of paper.
But just get creative, have fun with it, keep the best and yeah.
It's just easy to find what I need now.
Now, if you don't want to add another binder to your life because you are trying to downsize,
minimize, whatever it is, you can set up the same system using a scanner.
Take all your articles just like we did here.
Scan in all the articles.
If you use a great scanner like the Scansnap IX 1500 that I talked about recently, that
has something called OCR technology, meaning it's going to recognize all the characters,
all the words, and so then once your articles are scanned into your computer you can just
search for a keyword and it's going to automatically find that article, nice and efficient.
And then going forward, if you are receiving a lot of magazines, limit them to like two
to three per month and just keep your favorites, and then be mindful of all the papers that
you choose to print out, the papers you choose to bring home.
Because anything that's physical inside your house has to be organized, it has to be maintained
and eventually it has to be gotten rid of.
So just be mindful going forward.
Again, if you need more support on letting go of clutter, there's a link below to check
out my course on how to let go of clutter when you can't let go, so you can learn my
five step process on getting yourself to mentally and emotionally detached from your possessions.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
Thank you for being here and I'll see you soon.
Take care.
Bye bye.