Keeping Afloat on a Sea of Papers
My record keeping system:
--I have a box near my front door that I dump all incoming mail and papers into.
--Two boxes on a shelf are labeled "To Do" and "To File".
--I have four clear plastic storage boxes just the right size for files, and I bought about 200 folders, the kind that come with tabs you can write on (I'd lose replaceable tabs). I started out with three or four categories; but whenever I came up with a piece of paper that didn't fit into the categories I already had, I started a new file. These files are alphabetized so I can find them.

Mail Processing:
--Every week, I process the mail in the "Incoming" box: Pay bills, answer anything that needs to be answered, throw anything away that needs to be thrown away. The results of the processing go into two boxes: To Do, and To File. The To Do box has things in it that need to be done, but can't be done right away. (I procrastinate on them, but putting them in the box does mean I don't lose them outright.) The To File box contains things I need to keep for my records, from bank statements to the instructions to the clock radio I just bought.
--The To File box gets full eventually. When I get annoyed enough with it, usually once a month, I sort the items in the box by category and set those categories in piles. It takes up the whole floor. The items go into their respective folders in the plastic bins. If a folder has gotten too full, I start a new folder with the same title and the month and year. If there doesn't exist a folder for the category, I create one.

This isn't OCD--it's necessary organization. Without it, I literally forgot to pay my bills even though I had the money, left important papers lying where I found them only months later, accidentally wrote checks for money I didn't have, and ended up in trouble because simple paperwork seemed entirely too complicated.

When your mental organization doesn't work very well, you have to use external organization to compensate, which is what I do now. It works. Well, I still don't know entirely what's important enough to file; so a year's worth of paper takes up quite a lot of space. And sometimes things jam up with my planning and I forget to do it entirely. I had a late fee on a bill a couple of months ago thanks to that. But at least this way, things are always in predictable places, so when I start again, I'm not completely swamped by random papers!

Also, I completed my taxes this year for the first time without running to the local free tax help center. Pat on the back? Oh yeah.