Less is More
“Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window; Why, why, says the junk in the yard.”
Paul McCartney
As the accountant for my home-based business and household finances, I try to close out the previous fiscal year and usher in the new one with a clean bookkeeping slate by the end of January. This entails a massive shuffling and reorganizing of old bills, invoices, receipts, contracts, tax forms, and bank statements in order to create space for the following year’s records. My financial files drawer is never fuller than it is right now.
I’ve significantly reduced the number of hard copies I collect by choosing “paperless” options whenever possible and I amass far fewer file folders than I used to – all part of my ongoing pursuit to go green. It’s a work in progress. But this story isn’t so much about reducing paper, it’s about reducing consumerism.
About five Januarys ago, an office accident provided a powerful reminder that “less is more.” I think of this lesson every time I’m tempted to buy more containers to house my “stuff.”
At the time, my favorite drawer for filing financial paperwork was securely bolted to the underside of my desk. Files were right at my fingertips, at precisely the right height. But when the carpenter installed this sturdy, oh-so-convenient drawer about a year before, he warned me that I shouldn’t put too much weight in it.
Knowing that it was now at full January capacity, I promised myself I’d clean it out. Not today though… Maybe tomorrow. And then one afternoon I heard a huge crash from my upstairs office. It was the sound of my over-filled drawer hurtling to the floor.
My husband and I tried overhauling the bruised and battered drawer, but the metal slide it moved along was bent out of shape from the force of the fall. It was beyond repair.
I searched online for file cabinets that could be positioned under my desk, but I just couldn’t make peace with the idea of buying another piece of storage furniture. My go-to mantra is “All I have is all I need.” And here was an opportunity to prove it.
I already had a 2-drawer file cabinet sitting next to my desk. Maybe I could clean out one of those drawers for my financials. I went straight to work weeding out the files, but there were still too many folders, most of them containing documents from past projects that didn’t need to be readily accessible. I brought an armload of these folders downstairs to our main office where I archive our business records. And that led me to the process of going through everything stored in the eight – count ‘em, eight! – file drawers there.
I enlisted my husband’s help and the two of us spent an entire rainy Saturday going through files, our fingers walking backward through years and years of obsolete business and household records. By the end of the day, we’d filled six bags with paper for recycling.
The result of our downstairs office purge was seven drawers that held a small fraction of the files they once did, plus an empty drawer. And upstairs? I now had one drawer in my office dedicated solely to financials. For the time being, we’d tamed the paper beast.
During the years since the “financial crash” in my office, I’ve re-thought my printing and paper use, digitizing documents and further purging the contents of our file drawers. And over time, we’ve donated all but one of our downstairs cabinets!
What a mistake it would have been five years ago to buy yet another file cabinet. I would have foolishly filled it and never gotten around to dealing with the piles of outdated and useless paper we’d been saving.
How often do we do that … decide that the answer to every need is more rather than less? And why do we wait until things come crashing down – literally, like my overloaded drawer – before we realize we are mindlessly accumulating too much, straining under the weight of stuff we neither want nor need?
It’s a new year, and it’s time to clear.
