Experiment #2: We Need Batches! (Day 3: Other Mail)

Thankfully, the amount of physical mail that I receive is rather small, and for now, the system that I have in place works beautifully:

Eliminate junk mail, first

Unwanted sales flyers and other obvious junk mail go into recycling as soon as I bring them into the house. It takes no more time than adding them to the mail pile on our living room table.

Ignore it; it's okay

I reserve one day a week (Monday) to deal with the mail. Any important items go directly into a portable file box, in which I have designated--and color-coded--folders for:

• Unpaid bills
  
• Financial items to file (paid bills; health care, car, and insurance information, etc.)
  
• Other items to file (instruction manuals, warranties, articles and recipes torn from magazines, etc.)
  
• Non-critical action file* (event flyers, community calendars, etc.)
  
• To read (unread magazines, mostly)

Any items that require immediate action are things that I take care of on the same day that I open my mail, to save time and stress, later.

Shred it and forget it

Things of a more personal nature go to the shredder, including all of those solicitations for credit cards and insurance. As I said before, the volume of mail that I receive is small enough that I can usually shred mail on Monday, but I don't have to toss the contents of my home-office wastebasket more than once per month.

File away!

I'm still looking for a filing system that works for me, ideally, one that is simple and visible enough for me to find whatever it is I am looking for in under five minutes. If I had a larger volume of mail to contend with, I might opt for a mail scanning service like Mailbox Forwarding*.

I really love the idea of going completely paperless, with a digital filing system like OfficeDrop*. Here is how it works: you send the paper items that you wish to scan directly to the company. Then, they scan the documents, and make digital, text-searchable PDFs of your files. Finally, they upload the files to a cloud storage drive and provide support for download and integration into Google Docs, Evernote, etc. I'm tempted to try this kind of product, but I'm not quite ready to loosen the reins on security, just yet. I'll have to do more research, first. For now, I'm still looking for something that works for me.

*(Please note that I am not advocating these particular sites, nor have I used their services. I am only providing these links as examples of the kind of services usually offered by these and similar companies.)