Organizing 101: Mail

Mail can easily take over your house if you are not careful. The best tip I have ever heard is to open your mail over a trash can. I open my mail into 3 piles: trash, recycling, needs further action. Since I'm opening the mail directly over the trash can, the first pile is already taken care of. I then put the items that can be recycled into my recycling bag. Finally, anything that needs further action goes into a file sitting near the trash can. Every few days I sit down and go through that file and take action on as much as possible. Ideally I would take care of things as soon as I opened it but with two kids, that isn't always possible. The idea is to handle mail as few times as possible and get rid of the junk as soon as you can so that it does not get mixed into the important papers.