Section

Records

Paper is only worth the time it takes to find. A five year guarantee without a receipt is a claim rather than an entitlement, an inventory written after a flood is a memory test, and a filing system with eighteen categories stops being used in February. Records is the shelf for the small number of documents a household genuinely needs, and for the arrangements that make them findable in under two minutes.

Everything here is deliberately minimal, because elaborate systems are the ones that fail. Four folders and one rule about what goes in each. One box for manuals and receipts, with the purchase date written on the front cover. One inventory, written badly and quickly, room by room. Entries say what to write, where to keep it and how often to cull it, and when the paper in question turns out to be a service record for the building itself, they point to upkeep. The weekly ten minutes that keeps the whole thing thin is done alongside the calendar during the Sunday look ahead, and anything that turns out to be a keepsake rather than a record belongs in a box of its own, on a shelf, under the rules of storage.