My Quest to Receive Less Mail

A few months back I determined that I get entirely too much mail.  It takes time to filter through and it clutters up my place.  Boo!

I started by getting rid of the catalogs with www.catalogchoice.org.  Good, but since I believe in giving to charity (I suppose this replaces tithing for me) I’ve ended up on a lot of charity mailing lists.  At one point I was averaging a sheet of new return address labels a week.  Ridiculous!  I started sending each organization an email requesting to be removed from their list.  This worked fabulously and now I’m glad to be nearly mail free!  This method also works for obscure catalogs that aren’t on catalog choice.  Just find the customer service email on their website and drop a short please remove me email with your mailing address.  Done.

Now that we receive dramatically less unwanted mail it is no longer worth it to deal with it immediately.  So, I added a labels to our mail sorter to let stuff accumulate until there are enough to remove them all at once.   Now we have each person’s name, remove, and ads.  The ads space holds the weekly circulars and coupons until we need them for deciding on what to get on the next grocery run.  This works out much better than the coffee table ;)