Good Riddance to Clutter
Say Good Riddance to clutter for the New Year. Make it your New Years’ resolution to get organized and clear the clutter in your home or office. Unorganized paper records, hard drives, or other materials that contain personal data, puts you or your business at risk for a serious data breach. There many benefits of decluttering, ranging from improved organization to reduced stress, and most importantly, preventing identity theft. Saying goodbye to clutter can also be a great way to leave bad memories in the past and start the new year fresh.
Tips to say “Good Riddance” to clutter and start the New Year on the right track:
TAKE INVENTORY: Review your documents and determine what is important and what is not. If you have so much you don’t know what you have and wouldn’t notice missing, it’s time to properly destroy. Old files, mail, financial documents, old client records, or old media files, cause overflowing file cabinets. For businesses, there are requirements to keep data for a set period of time and privacy laws for confidential information of patients and client records. Precautions are necessary to safely store or destroy these items.
GET ORGANIZED: Tackle a little bit at a time. If you try to do it all at once you will get burnt out or make mistakes. Divide into categories, 1) Important documents, 2)Stuff you need to keep, 3) Items that need to be discarded or securely destroyed. Clearly label files so they’re easy to locate when needed. If space is an issue, save files in a digital format. Setting up a document scanning service that digitizes your files will maximize efficiencies and clear up space. Avoid stockpiling electronics because this increases the risk of a data breach (even if you have deleted confidential information on hard drives). The safest way to reduce this risk is hard drive destruction.
SECURE YOUR INFORMATION: Practice safety in your home and office. Use hard-to-guess passwords, and place them in a secure area (NOT ON A POST-IT NOTE). Place screen locks on all devices; use physical locks on drawers, office doors, and file cabinets. For your office, do not use recycle bins. Partner with a trusted document management company that provides locked security consoles with scheduled business shredding services.
SAFELY DESTROY: So now you have your discard pile. What should you do next? Do not just throw these items in the garbage, especially items containing personal data. Securely shred documents you no longer need. Using a professional shredding company will ensure your materials go straight to the shredder and everything is destroyed. For businesses, schedule a one-time purge or set-up scheduled shredding service. If it’s from your home, you can take it to an off-site shredding facility such as our Shop Shred Days.
So now you have the tools to start the new year off on the right foot and say “Good Riddance” to clutter. For the future, set aside time each day to organize and practice regular purging to prevent clutter from building up.
To learn more about how Shark Shredding can help protect and safely destroy your documents, please contact us to get a free quote.
