The Joyful Sort How To: Organize School Paper

Back to school! The time of supply lists, new shoes, bus schedules...and parents everywhere bracing themselves for an onslaught of paper coming home in backpacks every day.

Back to school also means fresh starts and clean slates, so what better time to commit to establishing some new habits that will help make this your most organized school year yet? My sons have been fortunate to attend schools that use Stephen Covey's 7 Habits as guidelines for their students, so I thought that it would be fun to apply some of those guidelines to the process that has helped us overcome school paper overwhelm in our house.

Put First Things First

My number one tip for keeping school papers under control is to put first things first and go through them right away, either immediately after school or during your family's evening routine. As soon as we walk through the door each afternoon, I empty my boys' backpacks and start sorting out the contents of their take-home folders while they grab a snack and we catch up on their days. Neither of them have homework this year (I'm slightly concerned that by typing that out it's somehow going to make it not real, like I've just inadvertently ratted out their teachers and now next week we're all going to be crying our way through an hour of math problems every night), so their papers typically fall into just a few major categories: artwork/completed projects and assignments, informational (notes about PTO fundraisers or special classroom events like Hat Day), and action needed (things like field trip permission slips and book club order forms). No major decision making is required during this part, I just sort the papers into their appropriate piles and move on.

Begin With The End In Mind

So once you've sorted out the paperwork, how do you decide what to keep and what's okay to toss? My approach is to start with the easy stuff that requires little thought. In our house that means that any action needed documents (such as forms that require a parent signature or prep sheets for a spelling test later on in the week) either get signed and placed into backpacks for a return trip to school the next day or stay on our radar by being placed in the family To Do tray kept in a high visibility area of our kitchen. Any informational notes about upcoming events or special days get plugged into our shared family Google calendar and then head straight to the recycling bin. This leaves the area that I think most parents struggle with - artwork/completed projects and assignments.

Truthfully, we end up getting rid of probably 80% of the art and graded work that comes home. Anything involving even a speck of glitter gets a hard pass from me (sorry, not sorry), and as much as I love my kindergartener's stick figure drawings of he and I holding hands and skipping on a rainbow, I definitely don't need six of them. Not saving every single letter tracing worksheet or graded spelling test doesn't make me any less proud of my kids or any less appreciative of their hard work. If you're finding that you're having a hard time shaking the parental guilt when it comes to tossing your kids' work, think of it this way: all of those finger paintings and math pages are going to accumulate, and fast, eventually turning into a much larger time-suck of a project to be dealt with. Begin with the end in mind by making a cut and dry decision in the moment so that you can ultimately reallocate that would-be project time to quality time spent with your children instead.

Be Proactive

One school of thought when it comes to paper clutter is to minimize touchpoints, to actually physically touch a given piece of paper only once and then move on, but I've found that having a few steps built into our school paper process provides an opportunity to stay objective about what items are truly worth hanging on to.

Daily: Any artwork or assignments that we've deemed keepers for now are moved into these baskets in our family office/reading room after I add a date and occasionally a note or funny quote to the back for future reference. Having a short-term drop zone like this helps keep our kitchen countertops and fridge uncluttered while also providing some leeway for items that I maybe wouldn't necessarily keep, but that the kids may not want to get rid of just yet. 

Monthly: At some point during the last weekend of the month, I take a few minutes to do a quick edit of the items that have ended up in the monthly baskets. A few more items inevitably make their way to the recycling bin (a particular doodle or writing assignment that one of the boys couldn't possibly imagine getting rid of a few weeks back may have lost its allure) and the rest go to these Container Store document boxes in the boys' bedrooms. These boxes are also where I toss any non-school keepsake papers that may pop up throughout the year, like letters to Santa or the bulleted plan that my eight year old wrote a few years back about how he was eventually going to take over the world. Once something goes into this box, it's likely that I won't need to do anything further with it for at least a few months, which. is. awesome.

Between school years: The end of the school year = teachers cleaning out their classrooms = more paper than ever. This makes it the perfect time to close the loop on that year's paper trail at home as well. At some point during the summer break, I'll carve out a half an hour or so to sort through the items that have accumulated in the boys' document boxes that year and transfer any must-keeps into these file boxes that we use for long-term storage.

Each boy gets their own file box with one hanging folder per school year. I love using a single folder per year instead of a full binder or document box per year because a) the thought of keeping 26 bulky anythings in my house gives me anxiety and b) the limited containment fosters a deeper sense of mindfulness about what is truly special and worth saving (this is also true for any other area of your home where you tend to constantly feel clutter piling up - try it!). Shameless plug: these have recently been added to The Joyful Sort's a la carte offerings, so if you think you'd like to get a custom file box of your own set up, email me at kelly@thejoyfulsort.com!

I also keep a clear tote bin for any of the boys' larger mementos, like their hospital hats and a few precious baby clothes, so any larger projects or keepsakes are stored there for now. There are some great options like Artkive and Chatbooks, where photos of things like projects and mementos (and even all of the paper I've been talking about) are turned into albums to be treasured instead, which is another great way to save even more space and time.

This is by no means the only system out there for managing school papers, but it works really well for our family and I hope that you've picked up some tips for your own home. By committing to a few minutes of daily upkeep, being okay with letting some things go, and being flexibile with testing out different systems to find out what makes the most sense for your family, school paper clutter doesn't have to be overwhelming. Is there anything that works particularly well in your house to keep your kids' paper under control? Let me know in the comments and Happy Back to School!