Before the avalanche of back-to-school (and back-to-work stuff) gets completely out of control, I tapped my friend Ellen Madere for some strategies. She is an in-demand organizer on the Shoreline, plus she’s one of the featured “expert” organizers in Real Simple’s Ask the Organizer column. Her background as a former picture editor at Esquire, Fortune and other national magazines means she knows her way around archiving. But that’s not all. She’s smart (and funny). She’ll help you figure out a solution for many of life’s daily challenges – archiving a life’s worth of papers, streamlining wine cellars, even composing and hand-writing condolence notes. We posed a few pressing questions, and here’s what she had to say.

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