1. Gather every piece of paper into one place
Do not sort in situ. Sorting a drawer, then a shelf, then the car, produces three half-systems and a lot of duplicated decisions.
Walk the house with a box. Kitchen drawers, the shelf by the front door, bedside tables, the car glovebox, coat pockets, the bag you took on holiday, the file box in the loft, the pile on the desk. Add anything paper-adjacent: envelopes you never opened, receipts, instruction manuals, the folder from the mortgage, school letters, old diaries with notes in them.
Put it all in one place with a large clear surface — a dining table works best because it lets you lay out stacks side by side. Floor sorting hurts after an hour and the stacks get kicked.
Get three things ready before you start: a recycling bag, a bin bag for anything with personal information that will be shredded, and a stack of sticky notes for labelling piles. A shredder should be within reach but do not shred as you go. Shredding is slow and it breaks the rhythm; shred at the end while watching something.
Collect the digital paper in the same sweep. Most households now hold half their records as PDFs scattered across an email inbox, a banking app and a phone’s photo roll, and sorting the physical pile while ignoring that half guarantees you do this twice. Make one folder on a computer called Paperwork Inbox and drag into it every statement, policy and receipt attachment you can find in fifteen minutes of searching your email for the words invoice, statement, policy and renewal. Do not organise it yet. Just get it into one place, exactly like the box.
Set a timer for ninety minutes and accept that the table will look worse before it looks better. It always does, and that moment is where most attempts are abandoned.