Ask HN: How do you organize your physical documents at home?

Every piece of paper gets a number written on it in bold felt-tip pen.

This number is near unique - usually the date that I'm filing it, sometimes a "natural date" such as a date on the paper itself.

I file them all in a single box, in order.

In a file I have a line per item. It starts with the number, then has as many "tags" as I can think of. This takes about 20 seconds per piece of paper.

grep is your friend.

Finding any item is now easy, and there are no decisions to make when doing the filing. I copy the index file to my handheld and laptop. Occasionally I print it, although I haven't done that in ages.

A few items are filed in separate files, but those are obvious.

I use more or less this same approach: Everything goes into a stack, and when I need something I just do an interpolation search through the pile using the date of the document as a key.

What remains depends on your life situation I suspect, but for ideas, here is what I do:

Some papers are truly important. I like to put those in one of those expanding files with multiple slots and a carry handle. I have one for my personal papers (will, passport, birth certificates etc), one for taxes and one for the house documents. These should be stuff that if the house is on fire, you want to grab and take with you.

Having taken care of the stuff you don't need in physical form, and the really important stuff you must curate carefully, that leaves a bunch of other stuff. In my case that is mostly product manuals and warranties, and personal and travel memorabilia. While I am not a hardcore GTDer by any stretch, I do follow it for filing: get a filing cabinet, a good label maker, hanging folders and file folders, and file the hell out of everything. For example for product manuals, have a hanging folder for kitchen appliances, put each separate manual in a file folder, label the folder with your labelmaker, insert file folder into hanging folder.

General clutter guidelines apply, like handle everything once, think about whether you really need this ever again (this is where scanning really helps you, as you don't have to agonise too much about the decision), etc.

I think any filing system you use needs to have O(1) no thought required inserts because inserts are so much more common than reads. I'm willing to tolerate a bit of time looking for what I need (though I can usually find everything fairly quickly) since I only do it a few times a year.

For this kind of documents you want to minimize the probability of loss, minimize the time to file them, and are not too concerned of the time to retrieve them. For this a drawer is perfect: just put them in the top of the drawer, and do not use this drawer for anything else. It does not look very professional but is very effective:

- It takes 1 sec, thus diminishing the probability of not doing it and losing the paper.

- Documents are organized chronologically, so you can find what you are looking for quite quickly. Just be sure to religiously keep everything in chronological order.

Once per year, transfer the drawer’s content to a folder. If you fill up more than one drawer per year this system might not be good enough for you.

Alas, my gf did not see the beauty of this system, and insists on having a highly sophisticated and complex storage system that I think is strictly inferior on every account.