Turning over a new leaf this year? If you’re ready to declutter your home or office, handling old records is an important step in the process. The 3-pile decluttering method encourages you to sort documents into three piles – keep, shred, recycle – and then address each pile from there, making the new year decluttering process easy to tackle for anybody. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the 3-pile decluttering method, help you determine which documents belong in each pile, and then highlight how the team at Royal Document Destruction functions as your partner along the way.
Declutter Your Home Or Office
Let’s visit more about the 3-pile decluttering method. Here’s what to do:
- First, gather paperwork lying around your home or office. This includes documents that are sitting in mail organizers, in junk drawers, on surfaces, and that have been filed in previous years but not well labeled for destruction.
- Make three piles: keep, shred, and recycle.
- Sort your documents. Keep anything that is required to be maintained by state or federal law, like vital records and tax returns (home office) or payroll records (business). Shred anything that is not required to be maintained and no longer serves a purpose, but that contains confidential or proprietary information like social security numbers, credit card numbers, or bank account numbers. Recycle documents that aren’t useful, aren’t required by law, and don’t contain confidential information. Examples of documents you can recycle include flyers, advertisements, marketing materials, and junk mail.
- Create a filing system for the documents in the keep pile, labeling folders by the type of document and its destruction date. File those documents.
- Work with a third-party vendor to arrange for paper shredding and recycling of the remaining documents.
RDD’s Mobile Shredding Solutions
When choosing a shredding solutions provider to assist you while you declutter your office or home, there are a few things to keep in mind. If you work in a heavily regulated industry like healthcare or pharmaceuticals, your vendor should be able to provide you with a certificate of destruction (COD) so you can verify for auditors that your documents were destroyed according to stringent industry standards.
It’s also important to consider whether the vendor provides on-site or off-site shredding; some vendors provide one or the other while others provide both services. For some organizations, only one service or the other will meet their needs depending on their setup and available resources. If you need on-site shredding (shredding at your home or place of business), be sure to find a vendor who offers on-site document shredding.
Contact Royal Document Destruction
Looking for professional document shredding services in Ohio? Royal Document Destruction provides secure on-site and off-site shredding in the Columbus and Cincinnati areas. We look forward to helping you declutter your office & home this year!
