Today was a snow day where I live, a great day to stay inside and take care of the foot-and-a-half-high Stack of miscellaneous, disorganized paper that needs filing. I am proud to say that I got the bottom of The Stack, while also setting up my 2010 bills files, consolidating files for work projects, and creating a special bin for projects that need attention.

I enjoy David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” diagram, but I am not good at organizing the items that I can’t complete in 2 minutes. These are the things that need to either get filed away into the archive, examined later as part of a project, or trashed. When I can’t make up my mind, or don’t want to take the time to put it where it belongs, a piece of paper just gets added to The Stack.

Stuff at the bottom of The Stack was two years old!

In a perfect world, there will be no Stack. I will make the time, in tiny increments, to put paper where it needs to go when it is first in my hands. I won’t keep things in view until I can decide whether to keep them (which I don’t do–they get forgotten in The Stack until I get a day like today to do filing–just filing).

Is there such a perfect world? How does an older person learn such habits? How many times will I need to read “Getting Things Done” before I get it?