Over the past few months I’ve focused on taking my life digital. In other words, I got tired of packing up boxes of papers every time I moved. This wasn’t a once-every-five-years activity, I seemed to be on a moving rate of every other year. (The overly frequent moving is a whole other issue that I’ll leave for another time.) Now, I appreciate that there are some papers that you just can’t throw in the recycle bin like medical information or taxes from previous years, but I’ve also held onto magazine articles I liked and seminar packets that I thought would be useful some day. I still want the information, but I don’t want to waste the space and effort necessary to store them. My brilliant idea was to go digital. I would stop getting new papers and eliminate all the unnecessary old ones. Simple, right? In theory, yes. In practice,…I wish.

I changed all of my bills to e-bills and all of my monthly statements to e-statements. I quickly realized, though, that the best part of receiving statements through the mail was that it was a passive activity. With e-statements, I get an email saying they are ready and then I have to log into my account in order to see them. I tend to put the email notifications aside telling myself I’ll do it later, but I rarely remember to do it. That has been a big mistake. What I have learned is that some institutions only allow customers to view statements dating back over the past 12 months. Turns out that if I want to see something dated farther back, I have to pay. So, now I not only have to log into the account and open the statement, I must also download the document and save it on my computer in case I need to review it at some future time. Sigh. Fine. I’ll do it. Whatever.

That leaves my saved papers. My plan was to sort through them and scan anything I wanted to keep. Scanning though is repetitive mindlessness. Five documents in and I’m already ready to quit. I decided that perhaps I didn’t need as many documents as I had originally thought. Funny how that happens…

The conclusion is that my plan was an admirable one both from a personal organization perspective and from an environmental one, however I learned that eliminating clutter did not necessarily equate to improved efficiency. Yeah, better luck next time?