The paperwork drawer, and how to stop dreading it
Most households do not have a filing problem. They have a location problem. The papers exist. Someone has seen them. They are in the drawer under the telephone, or in the second bedroom, or in the plastic wallet that came back from somewhere and was put down. What is missing is not the document but any shared idea of where a document goes once it has been dealt with.
This matters more in a caring household than in an ordinary one, because a caring household gets asked questions. Not constantly, but often enough, and usually at short notice, and usually by someone who is standing in the hallway waiting. The cost of a disorganised drawer is not the mess. It is the ten minutes of searching in front of a stranger, repeated.