Part 2 of my series of articles on how to tame the mass of paperwork and other crap we have to deal with in the modern age.
Here is part 1.
I guess I’m a true child of the computer revolution, because I am *far* more comfortable as to what to do with email then I am with snail mail. I hate mail, and not just a little. For years, I have had issues as my mail comes in, and forms piles on any horizontal surface (or as metauser calls them, “horizontal shit catchers”) in my house. These piles form as I don’t really want to take time to meticulously file them, but some of this mail *could* be important, so I keep it. Thus, piles on top of all my horizontal shit catchers. I decided last month that I had had enough of this, and I deployed a new strategy designed to combat the snail mail trails that were being left everywhere.
This strategy needed to meet the following criteria:
- Quick and as easy as leaving the mail in a pile on one of my horizontal shit catchers.
- Must be easy to find stuff if I need it in the future.
- Needs to highlight action items
So after some thinking, I came up with a strategy that seems to be working pretty well a month later. You need the following items:
- A file box, preferably with a little container on the top to hold a sharpie and the file folder labels. Make sure it’s large enough to hold all your mail for a year – count on getting a new one every January
- Hanging file folders
- 1-2 Hanging file pockets
- A Magazine holder
Take the file folder, and set it somewhere that is easy to get to, preferably on the surface you currently toss your mail onto, so that you can leverage the existing habit. Set the magazine holder next to the file box. In the file box, you want a folder for each important subject, plus 1 hanging pocket for misc mail, and one more for receipts (if you want to store receipts as well). When you get home, toss any mail that you don’t want to deal with on top of the file box. When you are ready to deal with it, grab the mail and the file box, and then sort through the mail. You will likely want to file things related to certain subjects on their own (for me it’s mortgage, home owners association, and retirement accounts). All other mail either goes in the hanging pouch or gets thrown away when you are done with it. Many letters get tossed in unopened, but really, you should try to at least *look* at most of the mail that goes in the random mail pouch. Any things that are action items you toss into the magazine holder. If you want to keep receipts, toss them in their own hanging pouch.
The end result is that you have a box for each year with essentially everything that is important to that year in it, and you have no snail mail trails on your horizontal shit catchers.
May 11th, 2005 at 2:20 pm
Soulcatcher-
Any good organizer will tell you to stand in front of a trash can and sort your mail BEFORE you go into your house. That way you aren’t tempted to keep the junk. And you should only have three back issues of any magazine. If you haven’t read December Wired by now, you’re not going to read it. And don’t keep it for one particular article, it’s available on the web. That should cut down on the amount of paper accumulating on your horizontal shit catchers.