This is as much about organizing as it is about purging.
As I take on volunteer jobs, I find that most of them come with piles of crap. It is so tiring to have to clean out the files of every job I take on before I even understand what the current documents are and where they are. I find myself shoveling loads of chit out of my house for these organizations.
The average person seems unable to organize stuff.
I just took over a treasurers job that is tiny. This job writes less than 8 checks a year. The treasury is under $1000. It is a small job. Yet it came with an unorganized mess of crap including 30 years of ledger records, spotty bank statements, and then the mess of non-financial records which was the bulk of the crap. I just wanted the checkbook and last 3bank statements, but finding them was a problem!
After that, I took over a huge job at a statewide level that generates chit tons of paper to accomplish the work. The number of forms that need to be completed is scaring me. So much paperwork (that must be completed in triplicate, sent via tracked post office method,etc.) yikes! A huge, packed box of old materials was passed on to me with the suggestion to “probably get rid of anything before 2017” but actually as a newbie with this complex job I am keeping most of it, just separating really old crap from more recent crap, the recent crap I can use as example work.
The jobs above plus a previously mentioned cleanup of dog club records had me touching, deciding on, filing and organizing probably a thousand documents. The one thing I see above all else from people who cannot organize is: they keep multiple copies of everything. The copies are stuck in random places, not together, because these papers are not organized. Keep one good, clean copy, people! And if you need blank forms, peel them off the website because they become outdated quickly, do. Ot keep old forms around. (!)
And THEN, in case there isnt enough crap to consider, my garden club district had to vacate the nearly free space where we stored our crap, and there was unhappiness and disagreement on 1) how much we really need to store 2) where will it go since leadership claims there is NO MONEY 3) WHO will take this crap.
STraight up I said “this is not coming to my house” so after throwing 3/4 of it away, someone took the rest to her house. I was nominally in charge of these items but I resigned my position because I wont be in charge of something that has no budget to support it. All of my plant societies rent commercial storage units for their crap, these garden club ladies need to get real about volunteers storing their stuff.
And I am now on the “space needs study” committee for our neighborhood because we need space for meetings big and small, storage, storage, storage, cop substation, archives work space and office etc and the storage of crap will be prominent.
So here is another long rambling post from Iris about her volunteer organizations. Dont read it!Just know the TLDR: people are crap at organizing, groups have too much stuff and they dont inow what to do with it.
haha!