De-Clutter Your Life, One Mail Pile at a Time

Do you stay on top of your mail pile? Learning how to de-clutter is supposed to be as simple as tossing out the trash, giving away the excess and organizing the rest. But what do you do with the mail that just keeps on coming -- sometimes in rubber-banded piles?

Set up Four Boxes

Use trays, leftover cereal boxes or clear plastic shoe boxes. Label one "bills," the next one "offers," another one "subscriptions" and the fourth box becomes "junk." You might even decide not to worry about a junk box and instead set up your indoor recycling can right below desk or counter where you are working.

Separate Bills from Junk (do this daily!)

Do you have piles of mail you are afraid to tackle, simply because some pieces come in pink envelopes marked "final notice" or "urgent?" Do not fret. Eliminating dunning notices is as easy as staying on top of your bills, which in turn only takes a bit of de-cluttering. Start by separating the envelopes and bills from obvious junk mail.

Put the bills into the box marked for them. Obvious junk mail -- like the circulars from the supermarkets and the weekend ads for the big-box stores -- go into the junk pile. Ads sent by companies you do business with (your bank or your mail-order clothing store) go into the "offers" box. After all, you might just want to save these ads for a closer look later on. Magazines go into the "subscription" box.

Delegate

Hand off the magazines to the subscriber in your household. Offers that might be of interest should go to the person most likely wanting to make the decision about buying or not buying a good or service. If you are the one in charge of these buying decisions -- and if you are looking at a rather sizable mail pile -- go ahead and de-clutter your home by declaring all the offers junk mail. The odds are good that the companies will send more material next week.

Open Envelopes and Shred Offers

Now is the time to open the envelopes containing the bills; are they really all notices of accounts (past) due? In some cases, advertisers have gotten savvy and dressed up their materials to look like bills, just to avoid being automatically discarded with the junk mail.

File away the bona fide bills into your "to-be-paid" system. Place the junk into the recycling can. The offers you decide to get rid of should be shredded, simply because some of them are already filled-in and contain your name, address and sometimes even birth date.

A Word on your Email Inbox

There is a good chance that the paper mail pile is not the only communication system that needs a revamp. If you have not already done so, set up a number of folders for your email inbox that are in keeping with the entities sending you the most emails. Organize your emails to be displayed alphabetically and sort the emails into the folders. From there, tackle email one folder at a time, until you are up to date on the virtual mail pile as well.