Take control of much of the paper clutter in your house at its point of entry – the mailbox.
The #1 best practice for keeping on top of your mail is this: open your mail over the trash can. As soon as you bring in the mail, before you put it down anywhere, before you take off your coat, before you check your voice mail, walk over to your trash can and start to sort. Throw out anything you don’t need. Junk mail, catalogs you are not interested in, flyers from stores you will not go to. Into the trash with it.
From what’s left, you will mostly have items you need to take some action on. It may simply be filing – an explanation of benefits or pay stub – or something you have to respond to – a bill to pay or invitation to reply to. Stay by the trash and throw out the envelope as soon as you take the paperwork out. Discard anything in the envelope you don’t need – advertisements stuffed in with your bills and the like. If you received any personal mail or cards, check the return address before you get rid of the envelope. This is a great time to put an address that you may not have already in your address book. Once you have done that, toss the envelope.
Anything that you need to take action on should either be filed immediately or go into a designated mail basket. You can keep this near your trash can – maybe on a corner of the kitchen counter or on a nearby shelf, or you can keep it in your home office or computer area. Put everything into that basket immediately so that you know where it is when you are ready to deal with it.
Next, reduce the amount of mail that you receive. If you pay your bills online, most companies and utilities offer the option to receive bills and notifications via email rather than paper mail. You can sign up for this without signing up for automatic bill payment, so you can still manually log into the company’s web site and view the bill before you pay it if you would like. Use services like the ones listed here to get your name removed from junk mail and catalog lists. Call or email individual companies that send catalogs you never look through or order from and ask to be removed from their mailing lists as well. The less mail you have to go through, the better, and you get the added karmic bonus of saving a few trees (Speaking of which, if any of your mail is recyclable, throw it in the recycle bin rather than the trash.)
Establish these habits and soon you’ll find that pile of papers accumulating on your desk, kitchen counter, or entrance way table is a thing of the past!
