Remember when you were a kid, and “getting mail” was really exciting?

Maybe it was a card from your grandmother, a letter from a pen-pal, or even the Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes envelope (am I the only one who used to play with the little magazine stamps as “stickers”?). Back in they day, getting mail was fun and kind of exciting. Of course, we got less of it, and we usually didn’t have to worry about things like “filing” or “paying” or “sorting.”

Nowadays, getting mail usually means bills (ugh), junk mail (double ugh), or magazines (fun, but potential clutter). While most of our everyday communication takes place on the phone or online, snail mail is still a presence in our lives… and on our countertops or desktops!

Here’s what I do for snail mail

What works well for me:

Most junk never crosses the threshold into my house. I keep my recycle bin near the door between my garage and house, the entrance I use when I’m coming in the house after retrieving my mail. Before I enter the house, I pause for a minute and pull out all of the flyers, pamphlets and junk mail envelopes that don’t contain private information, and I dump them directly into the recycle bin. They never come in the house.

The shreddable items (credit card offers, for example) come in the house, but go directly into the shredder. If I set them on my desk or counter (ostensibly to “shred later”) they sit there for weeks. Directly to the shredder they go!

The magazines go onto a small end table that sits near my loveseat. Once the shelf on that end table is full, I have to either recycle magazines currently on the shelf, or (if everything on the shelf is Need To Read material) the new magazines get tossed into the recycle bin with the junk mail before ever coming in the house–until some room is made on the end table shelf for new ones!

What I’m working on:

The “needs some attention” stuff is tough. The flyer for a conference I want to attend and need to register for. The bill I need write a check for and pay. The invitation I need to RSVP for (after checking my calendar and figuring out travel details).

The items that require some interim step between receiving it in the mail and disposing of it are the ones that befuddle me, and often end up being tossed in a pile on my desk where they promptly… sit. (Well, they sit *and* act as the foundation layer for additional pieces of “needs further action” snail mail that come later… so let’s not pretend that they’re completely useless.)

And then there’s the outgoing mail that I need to generate: birthday cards, thank you notes, the stuff that I want to send the “old fashioned” way rather than by email. I have the card, I have the stationery, I have the stamps… but all those separate pieces usually wind up sitting on my desk (near that nefarious pile of “needs further action” mail) rather than getting assembled and mailed.

What do YOU do with your snail mail?

What works really well for you? What are you working on?

Wouldn’t it be nice if bills just paid themselves?

But they don’t. So you have systems.

Now. Before you say, “But it’s a total wreck, Jen. It’s really not a system, it’s just a big ol’ pile,” stop for a moment. It *is* a system. It may not be photo-ready or tidy or glamorous (or maybe it is), but. BUT, if it’s all stuff…

• that’s in a reasonably predictable location
• that you can find most of the time and
• that you remember to do with B+ accuracy or better

…it’s a system. Even if it’s a total mess. Yay, you! So go easy here. You’re learning.

Here’s what I do to remember to pay my bills

What is currently working well for me:

Oooh. Transparency is scary. Here goes.

I double-schedule payments on my calendar. I practically need bill-paying thugs who threaten my kneecaps in order to remember to pay bills on time. Extreme, I know. I use Google calendar and I schedule a “day event” that appears at the top of my screen.

In addition, I schedule an actual appointment with myself at a time of day when I know I’ll be in my office. I learned this from experience – scheduling bill paying on days I was out and – woops.

I triple-schedule the really important bills. Yup. In order to avoid a credit card interest rate on par with my age, I triple-schedule my bill-paying appointments. All these reminders assure that I absolutely, positively do not miss a due date.

I gotta see it. When that bill-paying appointment rolls around, two big pop up reminders appear on my screen one right after the other. They’re practically impossible to miss. And they’re really annoying. “All right, all right,” I say to my computer. “I’ll pay them now!” (I’ll bet I’m not the only one who talks to her computer.)

The absolutely not-optional thing. You know by now that I’m pretty accommodating and malleable about systems. But there’s one thing that I am stern with myself on: I open my bills the day they arrive and schedule all those appointments I mention above. I do not pass go or collect $200 until they’re safely in my calendar – or they will get forgotten.

The non-environmental thing. I must have paper bills. I am primarily tactile, so holding the paper bill in my hands makes it real and allows me to physically and mentally process that it is, indeed, a bill. Without that piece of paper, I would probably never pay them on time. Sorry, trees.

What I’m currently working on

The reminder system. I’m still tweaking the Google calendar system. As I write this, I have a bill that’s due today that I totally ignored, because I barely looked at my calendar today. That’s, uhhh, less than ideal.

The danger in my current system is that if I don’t pay the bill today, it drops off my screen the next day and disappears. So I’m working on noticing what would work better for me and will induce less panic.

What do YOU do to remember to pay the bills?

What works really well for you? What are you working on?

Share your insights and ideas! Your comments on your own process are welcome. I also request kindly that you not give advice to me or others unless it’s specifically requested. This makes exploring safe and learning possible for every reader.