Peace of Mind Organizing

Handling the mail: the survey results

5 April 2010

A couple of weeks ago, I put together a poll on how folks deal with the daily onslaught of postal mail. The results are in and I think they’re kind of interesting.

I received 42 responses. 17 of those (or 40 percent) said they handled their mail every day. This made my eyebrows shoot up, but then I remembered that a good proportion of my readers are professional organizers. We’d expect organizers to process their mail daily.

Twelve respondents (29 percent) said that they look at it daily, but let it pile up. This seems very common to me, and something I see a lot in my clients. Five people (12 percent) said they let it pile up and look it at it once a week.

Four folks take a head-in-the sand approach and don’t look it at all until they’re trying to find something. None of the respondents said they leave it for someone else to deal with. And four answered other and left comments. Two of them said they let it accumulate at the post office, then pick it up once, twice or three times a week and deal with it then. (That strikes me as a very tidy solution, particularly if there are recycling bins at the post office and most of the stuff doesn’t even make it in to the home.)

If you handle your mail every day, I say bravo! To my way of thinking that’s the way to stay on top of things. It’s not a requirement, however. Looking at it on a weekly basis can be just fine, particularly in this day and age when so much of our urgent communication arrives electronically.

The trouble with looking at it each day but letting it pile up is that (a) that gets messy; and (b) you run the risk mail that wasn’t urgent when you first glanced at it becoming urgent by the time you get back to it. And if you let it pile up a long time, things can get kind of scary, particularly if you use the bills that come in the mail as a reminder to pay them.

If your lack of a system to handle your mail is a problem, perhaps you should give some thought to how you’d like things to be with regard to your mail. Then think about what’s stopping you from making that happen.

If you decide it’s time to do something about it, pick a system and make a good-faith effort to stick with it for a month or so. At that point, tweak it if need be. If the mail feels like a problem to you, I bet you’ll be pleased by your efforts to do something about it.

Tagged with: habits, mail, paper management, paper piles

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