I decided to go through and clean out my two nearly full 4-drawer file cabinets. I had paper files that I’ve been carrying around with me for a long time. Some of them were old tax files, but most of them were old school files.

In those cabinets I had copies of papers I’d written, old syllabi, as well as files from research projects I worked on. I kept these items thinking I might use them if I ever decided to teach at the university level again, even though I decided long ago that wasn’t the job for me.

More than any of the paper types listed above, I had a ton of data from my dissertation. I had field notes and interview notes, as well as transcripts of the interviews themselves. I had notebooks full of articles that were relevant to my research. In short, I had lots and lots data. In fact, all of those empty notebooks pictured above, plus two 4 drawer file cabinets were nearly filled with it (the small amount that wasn’t dissertation data was the other file types listed above).

So I spent several afternoons sorting through things. The tax files were simple: I put anything more than seven years old into the shredding pile (I had stuff going back 10 years, so not too crazy). I get very few bills or financial statements in the mail, and those I do get I shred immediately after I’ve verified their amounts and entered them into the finance-tracking software we use, so I didn’t have to wade through those sorts of documents.

The old papers and exams were interesting to flip through for a minute, but the likelihood of my turning those research papers into articles are almost zero. If I ever decided to go back and teach again, the old syllabi I was saving would be out of date, so I decided to recycle those too. If I need a syllabus as a model at some point, I’ll ask my friends who are teaching currently to send me a copy of theirs.

After those quick sorts, I came to the monster in my files: my dissertation research. It represents 8 years of time and the culmination of thousands upon thousands of hours of hard work. But I already used that data to write my dissertation, and I don’t see myself using it for anything else. So I said a silent thank you to the huge number of people who worked with me along the way, and started emptying all of those folders into my shredding pile.

I’m now left with two empty 4-drawer file cabinets, just in time to start keeping my 6-year-olds homeschooling records. (I wish I could say that the file cabinets were leaving, but we need them for another purpose).

Broader Applications

The papers are now gone, shredded into tiny bits and then added to our county compost pile. And I feel lighter for moving them out of my home. Though I decided that academia wasn’t for me many years ago, I had kept these papers around as a “Just in case.”

Sometimes we keep things in our lives, like I kept these files, thinking we might use them in the future. However, when we check in with ourselves, we realize (or already know!) we really won’t use them. It’s a way of holding on to the past or on to past visions of what our future may look like. For me, this was essentially the paper version of Decluttering Sentimental Objects (see HERE). And like most decluttering, while it was a difficult decision to get to the point of letting it all go, now that the papers are gone, I don’t miss them.

Do you have papers or other items that you’re holding on to that you’ll probably never look at or use again? Have you found it difficult to part with similar items?