- Before designing your filing system, you should consult your tax advisor or IRS Publication 552 (www.irs.gov). Determine which items you need to keep and for how long. This may sound like a pain, but it will save you hours in long run.

- Analyze your need to access items you have saved for past few years. If you haven’t needed to refer back to those utility bills and you don’t use them for tax deductions, why are you keeping them? In today’s digital age most information can be obtained on internet or requested from original source.

- Justify every piece of paper you keep! A simple filing method that works for many people is "rolling 12-month" method. Instead of filing "short term" records by vendor or topic, file them by month. You keep 12 files, one for each month, and each month dump contests of oldest month and slip in your new items. You will have additional files for items that require longer retention -- place these in alphabetical order behind monthly folders. Remember to keep these categories as general as possible to make filing and retrieval simple.

- Make sure your "keep forever" documents are safely stored in your Safe Deposit Box or at least a fireproof file box.

-Make transition from a current filing system gradual and painless. Pick one or two files a day and get rid of anything outdated or no longer applicable to your life. If records need to be kept for legal purposes, but are not something you need to access regularly, move them to back of filing cabinet in a permanent file section

Catching Up

Finally, you need to address accumulated piles from "before" you got organized. Don’t despair! You’ll probably find that most of it can be tossed using your new filing guidelines.

- Make a quick pass through piles, sorting into "toss", "long-term" and "short-term" piles. Hopefully there aren’t any action items hidden in pile!

- Shred or recycle "toss" pile. File (hopefully) very small "long-term" pile.

- Sort "short-term" pile by month and drop in appropriate folder. - If your filing was too far behind, make this a 15 minute a day task maybe while you do something relaxing like watch TV.

Gaining upper hand on paper requires a minimal but consistent time commitment. At first you will need to consciously make this a part of your daily routine. Before you know it, those mountainous stacks of paper are gone and have been replaced by neat files.

©2004 Bridget Messino

* Spend time with old people in nursing homes, especially those who have no family. Spending time caring about another lonely person will go a long way toward taking away your loneliness!

* Volunteer to help with serving food to needy over Thanksgiving and Christmas. Many churches and other charitable organizations welcome volunteers to help in food lines over holidays.

* Locate a retreat center near you that has a special event over holidays and share your time with other people who are also alone for holidays. Last year a friend of mine, who had just left her husband and was alone for first time with no family around her, went to a beautiful retreat center on East Coast. Twenty people gathered there to share Thanksgiving together. There was a wonderful ceremony of gratitude that she said filled her heart, and she enjoyed sharing time with new people.

* Find a church, temple or 12-step group in your area that has special events for singles over holidays. Go to these events with intention of sharing your caring with others, which you can do just by being interested in listening to another person. We all love being listened to and understood, and all of us have capacity to give this to another.

One of my all-time favorite movies is “A Christmas Carol,” – one starring Alistair Sim. I just love scene on Christmas morning when Scrooge realizes that no time has passed and he has opportunity to give. He feels such joy at prospect of giving, that he can hardly stand it! He dances around and stands on his head and laughs and laughs with joy of giving! In one night he went from being a miserable old man concerned only with getting, to a man now focused only on giving, and he became a joyful person.

While you might not have money to give, we all have caring to give. You have no idea how much you might enrich your own life as well as another person’s life just by giving your time, your attention, your interest, your smile, your understanding. Whatever your life circumstances, you always have opportunity to give your caring. You will discover that giving your caring to others, especially over holidays, is a profound way of caring about yourself.