Some useful information, some anecdotes, some rantings, and some inspiration
from my quest to make my family and perhaps the world around me A Little Greener Every Day

It’s been a couple of weeks since I updated you on my green home office project. Believe it or not, I’m STILL purging. It’s amazing how much paper has piled up and how difficult it is to figure out what to do with it all. Some things are obviously not needed and get shredded and/or recycled. But other things take time to figure out.

One of the actions I’m taking to stop the inflow of paper is to sign up for as much paperless billing as I possibly can. I am in charge of the bills in my household as well as all of my mother’s bills. She’s not going to be happy that I’m signing her up for paperless billing, but it’s the only way I can get this mess under control. The amount of mail that I get from her business affairs – bills, investments, bank accounts is so much more than what comes through my own family’s mail. For the longest time, I’ve gone along with all of the paper that comes my way through her because she isn’t comfortable with everything being electronic, but I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t go paperless with only my family’s stuff and keep her’s on paper. It would defeat this whole project.

Anyway, I realize that I need to do more than just sign up for paperless bills. I also needed to take the simple step of setting up to folders in my e-mail. One for paperless bills and one for bill payment confirmations. A lot of the bills I pay through my bank account, but there are a few that get paid through a specific company’s website. When I pay, I need a way to keep track of the payment confirmation e-mails.

It may seem simple to set up e-mail folders, but it’s something I’m really bad about. Even organizing my e-mail doesn’t come naturally to me. Right now, I’ve got over 3000 e-mails in my general in box! So I realize that not only do I need to get my physical space organized, I need to get my virtual space organized.

I still haven’t taken the time to find the right software to keep all of my financial statements – bank and investment statements. If anyone has any suggestions on really idiot friendly, yet extraordinarily effective financial software, please let me know.

One last thing – it looks like I will physically be moving my entire office in the next month or so. That might speed up the purgin process. We’ve decided to rearrange our entire house. My office is now in the old nursery, but I’m going to be moving down to what is the dining room and having half of it. The other half will be the boys’ study area. The dining room will move into a much smaller room that we now call the Internet Cafe. It’s the room where the boys computer is and a small table for their homework. So I suppose, my office will now be located in the new Internet Cafe. We’re doing this so each of the boys can have his own room.

The thing is, if I move my office to the first floor and I have to share the space with the boys, I really need to downsize, which is perfect for this project. Also, when I’m on the first floor, the office will be much more visible to people who come in the house so I will need to keep it tidy. Going paperless as much as possible is going to help that.

If you’ve read all the way here, thank you for putting up with my rambling. Part of the reason I’m documenting this on the blog is to have a written account to refer back to when I write my Green Home Office book.