One of the easiest ways to make your apartment look cluttered is to let paper pile up — it looks messy, attracts more clutter and is hard to organize if it gets out of hand. Here are some tips to help you clear out your paper clutter.

Sort
The best way to clear out paper clutter is to stop it before it starts — that means sorting mail, receipts and mail immediately into manageable bins or a filing system. Piles beget piles, so if you start tossing paper on top of paper, the pile gets bigger and bigger until it’s an overwhelming task to organize.

If you’re not up to filing everything immediately, then make filing later easier by having labeled bins or a mail sorter that is designated for types of paper you know you need to keep: bank statements, receipts. Toss them into the appropriate pile when you get them, and then later when you’re up to filing, you don’t have to go through the paper clutter to get to the good stuff.

Some initial sorting tips:

• Buy a mail sorter that has several slots for paper and label the slots.
• Buy a magazine rack or wicker basket to toss in old magazines and newspapers. When it gets full, toss in the recycling bin.
• For receipts, put a labeled envelope on the fridge to stash them in easily. It also keeps them within easy reach if you need one.

Once you get into the habit of automatically sorting your paper, it’ll become like second nature to you. The cleaning and organizational site FlyLady.com has some good tips on organizing paper clutter.

Trash
During the initial sorting, organizing your apartment will go a lot easier if you immediately trash what you don’t need to keep. Keep a recycling bin near your sorting bins to make it easier to automatically toss junk mail, old magazines, used envelopes and any other paper that tends to accumulate on counters, tables and other flat surfaces. Or, when labeling the sorting bins, keep one just for the stuff you’re going to trash — it’ll be the easiest filing you’ll do, because once that bin gets full, it just goes straight into the trash or recycling bin.

Just remember to shred anything that has personal, identifying information on it, such as old bills.

Keep
You may be tempted to just toss all old papers, but there are plenty you should keep, although not necessarily forever:

• You should hang onto old bank statements for a year minimum.
• Tax papers should be hung onto for at least three years.
• Keep receipts for electronics until the return period is up or the warranty period is over, but keep receipts used on your taxes with your tax records.
• Medical records are probably good to keep forever. Same goes for legal documents like wills, marriage certificates, birth certificates, etc.
• Get rid of old phone books, catalogs, junk mail, old bills more than a couple of years old and old school papers.

BankRate.com has a good chart telling you how long to keep certain records.

Store
It’s no good keeping all this stuff if it’s going to continue to be a pile of paper clutter. You’ll need a good filing system in place. Obviously a traditional filing cabinet will serve your purposes, but here are some other filing tips:

• Make sure to have labeled folders for each type of paper you have, including separate folders for types of bills.
• Stash important papers like birth certificates in a fire-proof safe.
• Put up magazine holders to store magazines you’d like to keep. These can go on bookshelves.
• Keep a photo album to stash in recipes, articles and other things you spot in magazines that you’d like to keep for reference. Then get rid of the magazine.

No filing system is any good if it’s also not purged once in a while. So at least once a year, go through your filing cabinet and purge old documents you no longer need.