How to Sort Your Mail Quickly and Easily

I helped someone go through their mountain of incoming mail each day.

Here are some helpful things to do if you have lots of mail (or even if you don’t) coming to your house each day.

It’ll likely take you 2-3 minutes to sort it… maybe not 2-3 minutes to fully read each piece, but you’ll at least be able to sort the junk from the important pieces.

Here's the video and the steps:

First, separate your mail into 3 piles (don’t open anything yet):

1. JUNK
2. NOT SURE
3. KEEP

1. JUNK stack: After you’ve separated all the mail into piles, tackle the JUNK first to get it out of the way.

With the junk, you can either:

• shred it
• recycle/trash it or
• write RTS (return to sender) on it, scratch through the barcode at the bottom, and literally, right now, go set it by the front door so you remember to take it back to your mailbox the next morning. As long as you haven’t opened it, your postmaster will send it back to the original sender and, more than likely, you’ll be taken off that mailing list.

You shouldn’t have any more Junk mail to tend to now. Move on to…

2. NOT SURE YET stack: If you can’t quite tell what a piece of mail is, open it, and then decide if it's Junk or Keep. If it's Junk, do the same as above (shred it, recycle it, or trash it).

Again, you can’t write RTS on it once it’s been opened.

TIP: DO NOT LET YOURSELF GET INVOLVED WITH ANY ONE PIECE OF MAIL YET. Just put it in a pile.

Don’t read the magazine, don’t read that sweet letter from your friend, don’t pay that bill. I’m telling you, if you get too involved in one piece of mail, it’ll throw off your rhythm of tackling all the pieces quickly.

By now, you should have eliminated your JUNK stack and your NOT SURE YET stack. Right? Move on to…

3. KEEP stack: So, now you should only have your KEEP stack in front of you. If not, finish steps 1 & 2. Now, here’s what to do with your Keep stack:

Make two stacks:

• Bills 
• JAM “just a minute” (magazines, letters, invitations, etc. – you definitely don’t want to get involved in any of these yet. They’ll suck you in!).

Go ahead and open your Bills. Do what’s necessary. Call the company. Set up the payment online. Contact customer service to make sense of it. File the paper. Do whatever steps you need to take for each of those Bills.

FINALLY, you can move to your JAM pile. The fun pile. The stress-free pile. Read the letters. Check out the magazines. Respond to that invitation.

And you’re done! You should have eaten through each piece of mail and have nothing left on your table – or your couch – or wherever you sit when you tend to your mail. 

Here’s a quick breakdown:

Bring in your mail.

Make 3 piles without opening anything: Junk, Not Sure Yet, Keep.

1. Sort your Junk stack first (RTS it, recycle it, or shred it)

2. Sort your Not Sure Yet stack second (open it, then recycle it, shred it, or keep it)

3. Sort your Keep stack last. Make 2 piles

-Bills pile: tend to each piece now
-JAM (just a minute) pile: you can tend to these in “just a minute” after you’ve tended to the bills.

I hope that’s helpful! If you’re getting loads of junk mail every day, there are some websites online where you can enter your information and they will delete you from every marketing system, etc. It might be worth a look.

Holler if you have questions! I love organization. :)
Venus