In honour of the upcoming tax deadline, I decided to use last night to catch up on filing some things. Specifically every receipt and piece of mail that I’ve received in the past four months or so. I like to keep good records but I don’t always spend the little time it takes to keep up. In lieu of that I take a few evenings every couple of months and get everything put away. The upshot is that I can check what my long-distance bill was in July of 2002. If I really wanted to. The basis of my philosophy is that I don’t know which bill I’ll have to refer to in the future. To make my future self happy and worry-free I just keep everything.
At first keeping everything was difficult and I thought it might be a dumb obsessive-compulsive sort of thing to do. Over time I’ve gotten used to it and it’s really not that hard. Most of the papers that I keep record direct financial information. These are account statements from the bank, the natural gas company, cell phone provider and so on. Others are pay stubs, cashed cheques or movie ticket stubs. Yes, movie ticket stubs. That might sound anal, but it’s a great way to jog memories.
Read the rest of “Sorting the World”…