Getting Organized

The amount of mail sent through the US mail system has doubled in the last 20 years, and the number of e-mails sent is still rising. As e-mail and land addresses are increasingly traded between companies, unsolicited offers and catalogs threaten to swamp the items we genuinely want to read -� and sorting them out can eat into our time.

Although you may not want your home to feel like an office, you can still usefully apply business systems to accumulated paperwork and incoming mail: make a firm decision on every item as soon as you can, store only what you have good reason to keep, and be ruthless in what you throw away.