Though March has been uncommonly gentle (knock on wood), it's been another doozy of a winter here in Chicago. The snow showed upshortly after Thanksgiving and intensified throughout December and January.On the rare days when I dared to wear something other than my Michelin Man down parka, I regretted my vanity almost immediately.

For investors, the past year has also felt like a long, hard winter: a nasty slog that we can't put behind ourselves fast enough. There's no telling whether the current rebound is the start of something big or the equivalent of a 70-degree day in a Chicago February. Nonetheless, it's still a good time to assess the damage that the bear market has wrought on your investments, get your financial paperwork in order, and develop an action plan to address any problem spots.

So what should be on your spring financial to-do list? I haven't addressed each and every important financial task, but here are some of the most important tasks you should focus on. I've rated each of the tasks by difficulty level.

Step 1: Organize your paperwork.
Degree of Difficulty: Moderate to Difficult
With the volume of papers and junk mail coming in, keeping your home office or desk free of clutter is a daily battle. If you're winning that war and have a filing (and disposal) system that makes sense for you, give yourself a pat on the back and move on to the next task.

For the 96% of you who still need some help in the organization area, you'll find some organizational tips here. For guidance on what financial paperwork you need to save and what you can safely toss or shred, check out Sue Stevens' piece.

Step 2: Implement a strategy for incoming documents.
Degree of Difficulty: Easy
Once you've tamed the financial paperwork you already have, you also need to develop a strategy to keep incoming documents from getting out of control. Attending to your mail each day takes only a few minutes and goes a long way toward keeping you out of the mess you just dug yourself out of.

As you sort through your mail, classify it into one of four groupings. Items for further perusal such as magazines and personal correspondence go in one pile, bills in another, and financial statements in yet another. The largest pile is reserved for junk mail, which you'll need to further subdivide into two categories: items you can immediately recycle, such as envelopes, and items you'll need to shred first, such as anything with your personal information on it. (I interpret "personal" pretty conservatively and shred pretty much anything with my name and address on it.)

Step 3: Input your portfolio into an online monitoring tool.
Degree of Difficulty: Easy to Moderate
If you've recently organized your financial statements, you should be in good shape to get started on this next task: inputting your portfolio into an online monitoring tool so you can track your performance and troubleshoot any problem areas. Although it takes a few minutes to do this, once you have your portfolio set up online it doesn't have to take a lot of maintenance and will save you a lot of trouble later.

Begin by collecting your most recent statements for each of your holdings: 401(k) and other company plans, IRAs, checking accounts, and any other taxable investments. You'll need the name of each holding as well as its most recent value. From there, the easiest way to aggregate your holdings for online monitoring is to go to Morningstar's Instant X-Ray tool, on the Tools cover page of Morningstar.com. Plug in the tickers and the amounts for each of the securities you own; type in CASH$ to encompass assets in your checking or other short-term accounts. Click Show Instant X-Ray.

You'll see an array of pie charts and style boxes that you'll be able to go back to later. First, though, click Save Instant X-Ray as a Portfolio in the top right-hand corner of the page. At that point, you'll be asked to decide whether you want a Transaction Portfolio or a Watch List portfolio. The Watch List portfolio gives you a quick and easy way to store a current snapshot of your holdings and monitor today's positions on an ongoing basis. The Transaction Portfolio provides a more precise view of your portfolio on an ongoing basis and is best suited for those who are apt to make frequent changes to their holdings. Give your portfolio a name and sign up for free alerts and portfolio updates so you can find out when something major has changed with your investments--for example, if a mutual fund's manager has left or if a stock's price has shot through the roof.

Step 4: Identify trouble spots at the portfolio level.
Degree of Difficulty: Moderate
Once you've entered your portfolio on the site, click the X-Raytab toward the top of the page. You'll be able to see how much you hold in stocks (both foreign and domestic), bonds, and cash. You'll also be able to see the geographic exposure of your stock holdings and how your portfolio is arrayed across Morningstar's stock and bond style boxes.

If you're comfortable wading in and making sense of all of these numbers, great. If you'd like a helping hand to put all of these facts and figures into context and to see if you have any problem spots that merit your attention, click the X-Ray Interpreter tab. A description will appear beneath each of the items in the X-Ray. For example, the Interpreter will tell you whether your portfolio's stock/bond/cash mix is conservative, moderate, or aggressive, or if you have an outsized position in a certain investment style, sector, or geographic region. Read over this information to see if your portfolio's current positioning is in line with your expectations.

If you want to take your portfolio-investigation work a step further, use Morningstar'sAsset Allocator tool to assess whether your current portfolio puts you on track to meet your financial goals.Alternatively, you can print out your X-Ray page and compare your portfolio's asset-allocation and investment-style positioning with that of a good target-date fund geared toward someone of a similar age. (Morningstar's analysts like the target funds from T. Rowe Price and Vanguard the best.) If your portfolio is dramatically out of whack with the allocations of one of these funds, that should prompt you to check up on what's causing the divergence and possibly take corrective action to address it. For more on how to bring a portfolio in line with your asset-allocation targets, read "Tune Up Your Portfolio in Six Easy Steps" and "Rebalancing a Sample Portfolio."

Step 5: Identify individual trouble spots.
Degree of Difficulty: Moderate to Difficult
If your holdings generally hold up well to portfolio-level scrutiny, turn your attention to your individual stocks and funds. You can begin by looking at performance, both relative and absolute, with a particular focus on performance over longer time periods. Some planners and financial pundits provide ironclad rules for when you should dump an investment--telling you to sell anything that loses 25% of its value or lands in its category's bottom third over the past three years, for example. But I think that's a recipe for poor portfolio returns. Of course, a prolonged performance slump may be a reason to sell a fund or stock, but if the fundamentals of the security are still good, buying it in the dumps can be a profitable strategy.

If you're comfortable digging into fund and stock statistics, Morningstar.com has many of them to help you evaluate why your fund or stock has been a laggard. If you're delving into a mutual fund's weak performance, for example, focus on whether the manager or fund investment style has changed or if its expenses are on the rise. For stocks, red flags might be rising debt levels, an overly lofty valuation, or declining profitability, among other factors.

But by far the most efficient way to get your arms around the myriad issues surrounding a stock's or fund's past performance and future prospects, however, is to read ourStock orFund Analyst Reportsthe key benefit of being a Premium Member of Morningstar.com. By scanning the Analyst Reports for each of your holdings, you can quickly size up whether you should sell or buy more of your holdings.