2. Sort into broad piles without reading anything closely
Speed is the whole trick in this step. The goal is not to decide what happens to each document, only which pile it belongs in. Give yourself three seconds a sheet.
Use these seven piles, written on sticky notes: Money, Property, Vehicles, Health, Identity, Warranties and Manuals, and Sentimental. Then two more that are not piles but bags: Recycle for anything without personal detail, and Shred for anything carrying a name, address, account number or signature.
Read only the top corner of each sheet — the letterhead and the date usually tell you everything. Resist the urge to actually read the letter from the bank in 2023. Reading is what turns a ninety-minute job into a six-hour one.
Things that go straight in the recycling without thought: catalogues, marketing, expired insurance quotes, delivery notes for items long since consumed, ATM slips, supermarket receipts for non-returnable goods over a year old, and superseded versions of documents you have a newer copy of. This is usually well over half the pile, and it is the fastest win of the whole weekend.
Anything belonging to another adult in the house goes in its own pile, unread. This matters more than it sounds. The fastest way to turn a productive Saturday into an argument is to make retention decisions about someone else’s bank statements or medical letters, and the fastest way to stall is to stop every few minutes to ask them. Give each person a labelled pile, hand it over at the end, and keep joint documents — the mortgage, the tenancy, shared accounts, household insurance — in the main sort where they belong.
If a sheet stumps you, put it in a Decide Later stack and move on. That stack should be small; if it grows past a couple of dozen you are overthinking the sort.