Return to sender

I have a problem with mail. I love getting personal letters or packages, as I think most people do, but everything else I hate! I hate looking for a letter opener to open it. I hate shredding the envelope when I give up finding the letter opener. I hate deciding if I'm going to scan the document or stick it in the mountain of "to be scanned" documents or just face reality and trash it. I hate deciphering if it's trash or real since they all say "dated material - open immediately!!!11!". I am only marginally amused by the blatant misspellings of my name (Jamie Stikler? You're not even trying ...). I heard about this service called Earth Class Mail and wondered if it would do us any good. Maybe if someone else vetted all our mail for us that would help. They scan it, show you the contents if you want, recycle it for you, deposit the checks for you. All this sounds great! But I wondered how much worthwhile mail I actually got versus junk. If I could just keep on top of it, maybe we wouldn't need a personal assistant at our house to handle the piles of mail.

So I counted mail for the entire month of October. Well, let's be honest. I took all the mail we got in October and dumped it in one big cardboard box and ignored it until Sunday. I did mention I hated going through the mail, right?

So this is what we ended up with:

That's all our mail. And here's how it sorted out:

82% of it went straight to the recycling bin. I opened the three cards immediately but later recycled them. And the bills and statements ... well, they're still in that giant pile "to be scanned".

So I'm still not very happy with our mail situation but it's not as dire as I first thought. If I can just get the scanner prepped and our sofa table of sorting under control, we can hopefully stay on top of this. I still may interview for some personal assistants, perhaps paying them in Ruby Tuesday and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons.