All right, one of my favorite ones that literally my parents didn't ever do until literally the end of their career is use what's known as discard dates. So when you have things that you need to keep for a while, make sure that you kind of put a sticky note or something on top of them or write in a red pen. When is the date that you can then discard this by, and I often like to keep it in terms of month and I'll, you know, say it's taxes like I said, that's a seven year so I'll add it for seven years plus one month. So you know, I got my you know, 17 tax returns in then what that means is that I can get rid of that. And you're 24 and whenever the month is, which would be something like oh my goodness, thank God I have a CPA like April or I'm sorry for At the end of April, so I would do it like on the fifth.
So that's what I'm really trying to aim for is understand when I'm able to get rid of these materials and kind of get them out of my filing cabinet and system. So that way, I'm not getting cluttered with tons of old materials. There's a lot of things that I have. And I'm sure as you start adding discard dates to certain things you're going to understand, right? I don't need to keep this and oftentimes I'll start adding even arbitrary disk, discard dates, in which I'll say, you know, here's this XYZ course. And all this information that I'm trying to build up for creating this course.
If I don't make this course by you know, the end of the year or you know, whatever it is, don't make this course by then. This is a discard date, because obviously, this isn't going to get done. If I'm not creating a course that I've built up all of this information for within a year. That information may be irrelevant, especially in the digital market. age or I may end up you know, just putting it in such a backburner that it almost becomes this thing in my mind where I have all this stuff I should use it I really should go towards I should and although should have woulda couldas is going to eat away at your fire and your drive to actually do things that are at hand. So make sure that you add discard dates to almost everything that you can to make sure you're kind of adding these obligatory end dates where if you don't do this, if you don't use this, get rid of it, delete it, or if you need this, keep it until a specific date and then get rid of it on this day or month.
When you do that, everything will become a lot less bulky, and there's gonna be a lot less papers to go through as time goes on.