This past week really took something out of me. I'm not really sure what that something is, but it was kind of a tough go. I don't think it was so much the not-buying part but the not-going bit of it that really gave me trouble. More on this bit later tonight, I think.
My original intent this week was to take it a little easy by making the challenge sorting and filing the mail every day. This should be, what, a ten-minute task, tops? But of course my next thought is of the enormous pile of old mail and various paperwork that is squatting shamefully in my closet right now. There was a water bill in it that wound up going a couple of days past due. Not the worst in the world, but still. Peter's the main bill-payer in the household, but our current procedure of "open mail, leave opened mail on counter, migrate mail to pile on desk, migrate pile on desk to closet pile" isn't really doing it for me. The visual clutter drives me batty, and out of frustration I end up dumping things we need. In some cases, that means, say a water bill. In others, it's some ratty scrap of paper with a code or phone number on it or a marked-up sheet of paper that turns out to be a vitally important piece of homework that I have to painstakingly restore with an iron. Or a days-old receipt that becomes necessary when something (that I didn't buy) needs to be returned.
A while back I tried to institute an inbox for important papers -- a sort of holding area for things until they got filed. That inbox is now sitting, I believe, at the bottom of the Box of Shame in the closet.
So after a Sunday off of any of the 52 considerations (no mail delivery! whoop whoop!) my mission tonight is to find a method that will work to 1) keep mail off the counter; 2) move bills someplace where they will be seen before being filed; and then 3) file the rest of it away.
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