i am sparticus: How To Pack: Paper

How To Pack: Paper

You have too much paper in your house. You don't realise this because it's all stored neatly away in drawers and shoe boxes and ring folders. But really, if you looked, you have too much paper in your house. If you don't believe me, try moving house. I think that during the course of packing I have gotten rid of around three trees worth of flyers, old cards, instruction manuals, lecture notes, letters about my flat, mobile phone statements, talk notes and pieces of paper that had vital bits of information on them that I should never lose. Obviously there are some pieces of paper you'll want to or need to keep. The best plan is to sit on your bed (or whatever) with a big pile of paper and divide them into piles based on "Critical" "Keep" and "Throw". If for a second you deliberate over whether something belongs in the more important pile then it almost certainly doesn't. If your less important piles end up smaller than your more important piles, you probably need to throw more stuff out.

When this is all sorted here are four things to do with all that paper that will help you put off packing further:

• Try and organise all the paper that is left in the 'Keep' pile. Organising the 'Critical' pile probably isn't a bad idea but organising the 'Keep' pile is an entirely futile and pointless task and therefore will keep you occupied for hours. Just stick it all in a folder and call it quits.
• Make Paper planes (here's a website devoted to designs of them). It's quite fun to see what sort of paper goes farthest (I find classic A4 printer paper still works the best).
• Read them. Lecture notes from two years ago are fascinating bits of information.
• Remove all the staples and the plastic windows of envelopes. It turns out you can recycle pieces of paper with the staples still in and with plastic windows in, but if you don't know that you can spend a long time removing them instead of packing.

After all this is done, just dump it all in the nearest recycling bin. Paper is one of the easiest things to recycle, so if you don't do it you're a fool.

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