Alan’s System for Doing the Mail Breaks Down

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I have a system that I follow each week for going through and responding to my mail.  And whenever I deviate from it, stuff like this happens.

But before I tell the story, let me give an overview of my Mail Processing System.

My System for Doing the Mail

This is actually just one part of my personal organization system that I created for myself (with flow charts and everything), covering phone calls, email, office organization, voice notes, and summarizing and storing what I learn from reading.  This is extreme, but then again, the two hours I spent organizing myself and creating a structured way to do this has saved me countless hours and spared me an office that looks like this:

(Side note: If you don’t know already, I have terminal A.D.D.  The good news is that I’ve been given 54 more years to live.  The bad news is that I have to spend those remaining years bumbling around like an incompetent boob so far as remembering anything or keeping things tidy are concerned.  BUT, when I finally embraced this fact, I created habits, routines, and systems in order to cope and ultimately have come out more productive than you genetic elite out there, born with the twin silver spoons of attention and the ability to remember anything for more than 5 seconds already in mouth.)

Here is the process for mail:

On the weekend, I pick up my mail from the UPS Store.  I do this so I don’t have to give out my personal address, as I’ve already had not one but two psycho tenants threaten to come after me for daring to expect rent.  It takes time to drive down the road and pick it up, but I don’t mind because it’s on the way home.  (Plus, some things are still worth doing yourself, like my daddy-daughter ritual of grocery shopping and errands and Saturdays).

When I get home, I put the mail on a certain corner of our kitchen island that reminds me to carry it downstairs the next time I go down.  It might be a few hours or a day, but eventually it makes its way downstairs to the inbox in my office, where it waits until Monday morning, when I go through it all at once.

I decided a year ago to only go through my mail once per week, because:

1. You save a ton of time by batching similar tasks together all at once
2. It saves me 5-7 trips to the mailbox
3. I hate doing it and would rather do it once per week than every day
4. In over 70 weeks since I started this, NOTHING has come in the mail that was so urgent that it couldn’t wait for a week at the most.  Think about it…have you ever gotten a bill in the mail that was due tomorrow?  Everybody knows that mail is slow, and that’s why urgent things don’t come in the mailbox, they come by phone or email.  So your mail can wait until it’s convenient for you.

If you’re afraid to try this, remember that not every letter you get will be 7 days old.  The average piece of mail you get, if you check it once per week, will be 3.5 days old.  Is there anything in the mail that can’t wait 3.5 days?  Just put it off and do it once per week at a scheduled time.

Anyway, on Monday morning, I do the following:

Flip through everything in the inbox and divide the mail from the other papers.  I put the other stuff in a pile on the floor and come back to it.  I put the mail in a stack on the desk, all facing up and towards me, and throwing out the stuff I know I don’t even want to open.

I turn the stack of mail over, pull out my letter opener, and open all of them one at a time.

Then I take out the contents of each one (or just read it if it’s a postcard) one at a time.  They go in 4 main piles before I act on any of them:

Pile #1: Bills to pay

These go in their own pile so I can whip out the checkbook and knock them out one at a time while I’m in “checkwriting mode.”

Pile #2: Action Items 

By this, I mean things to take action on within the hour.  This is stuff like looking at a website mentioned on the postcard, disputing a bill, responding for more info, responding with a phone call or email, etc.  Some of these I do myself, the rest I type in a quick summary to my assistant in the daily Executive Briefing.

Pile #3: Stuff to file

This is stuff to file in my file cabinet for records or if I ever want to refer to it again.

Pile #4: Stuff to take action on later 

This I also file in my file cabinet, but I make a note somewhere to come back to it and when.  Usually, this is written on my weekly checklist, as a reminder in Outlook, or in an idea/project list, depending on if it needs to be done this week, by a certain time, or just whenever it’s time to get around to it.  Watch out, because THIS is the pile of stuff that will linger around your office forever and make it a mess.  Remember that piles are not reminders…reminders are reminders.

Lastly, I DO the tasks needed to process each pile, one pile at a time.  First I pay all my bills.  Then I take immediate action on the Action Pile.  Then I file the rest, setting reminders for some of them to get them done later.  And I use the Paper Tiger filing system, so I know I can retrieve anything I file in 5 seconds.

There are actually two more piles–one is the Reading Pile, where magazines and anything else I want to read get placed.  Then, whenever I feel like reading (which for me is Sunday afternoons), I go to the pile and take my pick.  The other pile is Stuff to Put Away Somewhere Besides a File Cabinet.  These items I will put away, if they belong in my office, or put in a pile by the door to go upstairs the next time I go up.

Sounds like a good plan, right?

The System Breaks Down

My perfect process had a humorous monkey wrench thrown into it when my wife went to pick up the mail on Saturday, and left it in the passenger seat of her car.  Sunday morning we got in her car to go out (I was driving) she took the mail out and put it on top of my car so she wouldn’t have to sit on it.  There it sat on the roof of my car all day (you can see where this is going).

Come Sunday afternoon, the kids were asleep and I decided to go to get some reading done, so I hopped in my car and burned rubber all the way to my favorite diner.  As I arrived, I noticed a magazine caught between the rear windshield and the trunk, flapping in the wind.  It turns out I drove off, in the snow, with a week’s worth of mail on my roof.  One would think that I’d have noticed a pile of letters on top of my car when I got in, but again, attention has never been my forte.

Undeterred, I read my library book on email marketing for 2 hours, came home, and found all of my mail in the street within 100 feet of my house.  All of it was soaking wet, covered in snow and ice, and had been run over multiple times.  See Exhibit A, below:

Nevertheless, I put it in my inbox where it waited for me until Monday morning and the system resumed from there.

Moral: Do routine things the same way every time and crap like this won’t happen.  If you guys have any thoughts or tips on how to be more efficient at going through the mail, let me know in a comment.