Five days a week, paper mail comes to your mailbox. Your letter carrier does not distinguish what is irrelevant and what is important. That’s your job, but you are succeeding?
The worse case I’ve come across was someone who had not opened mail (including the flyers) in over six months. When we finally opened and sorted through the piles, we discovered that there was over $2000.00 in uncashed cheques.
How much are your unsorted piles of paper mail costing you?
On the other end of the spectrum is the ideal – your junk mail automatically disappearing into your recycling bin, all your bills paid on time, and all your statements and information filed for reference.
Most people are somewhere in between these two extremes.
Create a Transition Place
Often it is the lack of a designated “transition place” that causes mail to pile up. We know the moment we touch something we want to keep it, or have processed it but we tend to set them down any old place. This is how our piles start.
The key to attacking your paper mail is designate transitional homes for your piles of information – a safe place to keep it until you can act on it.
Divide Paper Mail into Categories
Here are some transition piles to begin with:
- Mail to open.
- Bills to pay.
- Statements to file.
- Calls to make.
- Tasks to do.
- Specific projects.
The next step is to determine a location in your home or office to accommodate these piles of information. Consider your space and your work style:
- File folders in drawers or in a hanging file frame on a desk.
- Mail sorters or in/out trays.
- Designated drawers in your desk (or if in the home, in your kitchen).
You are now armed with a new way to manage the ongoing onslaught of your incoming mail. Sort it immediately into its appropriate action holding spots instead of creating a trail of piles throughout your office and home. It is not about acting now. It is about knowing where to find things when you are ready to act on them.
If you need help sorting your mail and getting a process in place, contact the Out of Chaos team through our website.
Image by Gerhard Gellinger from Pixabay