Posted on January 2, 2008 - by Venik

Getting organized

NY Times ran a piece A Clutter Too Deep for Mere Bins and Shelves about potential impact of clutter around the house on your mental and physical health. I don’t know about your house, but for me the biggest source of clutter always has been the mailbox. Every time I would clean up, the crap would start piling up beginning with bills, credit card offers, ads and coupon booklets. It’s amazing how much garbage my mailman can jam into a tiny mailbox.

And then there are all the bags, and paper, and boxes from all the garbage you buy at the store. Every flat surface in the house starts growing reefs of key chains, Wawa receipts, bubble gum wrappers, matchboxes, and all the other valuable things you carry in the pockets of your jacket. Every time I come home, I would empty out my pockets and deposit the contents onto the nearest available horizontal surface: a shelve, top of the TV, dining table, coffee table, etc.

Sure, you can try to fight your bad habits and for a short time your house will remain clean. This cleanness, unfortunately, will not last and the garbage will start accumulating once again. Rather than fighting your bad habits, try working with them. Most billers these days can provide you will paperless bills online. Not only this is good for the environment, it’s also more convenient. Now you can stop picking up your mail. Eventually, your mail box will fill up and the Postal Service will stop delivering your mail. If this measure is too extreme for you, then you need two things: a good scanner with ADF (automatic document feeder) and a big trash bin for paper.

Look around your living room and find the area with the highest concentration of old mail: that’s the sweet spot of your messiness. Remove whatever is there and replace it with a desk barely big enough to hold a scanner and a laptop. Put a trash bin next to it. When you bring the mail home, quickly look it over and whatever looks important, remove it from the envelops and put it in your scanner. Many ADF scanners will hold 30-50 sheets of paper, so you don’t need to scan every time you pick up mail. Toss the rest of the main in the trash and leave it there until the bin fills up: this should give you a few weeks just in case you missed something important and need to dig it up.

Most scanners can scan all your bills and whatnot into a multi-page PDF file. There is OCR (optical character recognition) software that can convert these scans into readable text. Chances are, a version of such software was included for free with your scanner. If you have extra cash, you should get Adobe Acrobat (not the Reader, but the full version). Now you have all your important mail scanned and available for searching. The best way to pay bills is online: Wachovia Bank has one of the better interfaces for online banking. It’s free and convenient.

The best way to keep your horizontal surfaces free of clutter is to keep them completely empty – no exceptions. That way you will quickly see if anything is out of place. Things you should have on your coffee table? Nothing. Completely empty. Except, maybe, for a cup of coffee. Anything that costs less than $20 and does not belong in your pockets – matches, cigarettes, receipts from various purchases, bubble gum, etc. – either stays in your pockets or goes in the trash. This way your house will be clean: either because you keep things where they should be, or because you throw them out all the time and eventually run out of money and can’t afford to buy that trash in the first place.

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