Tips for climbing envelope mountain - how to open the mail when you've been procrastinating
So many people procrastinate about opening their post. Unfortunately, unlike email, where the passive-aggressive little “unread” number just ticks higher, actual mail takes up space in your home, so eventually you have to deal with it one way or another. (It’s probably a good idea to do something about those emails too, but that’s a problem for another day.)
There are many reasons why unopened envelopes build up. Some people are in debt and are avoiding scary overdue payment letters. Some people are neurodivergent and letter-opening is a chore they tend to avoid. Some people are just busy and keep putting it off until they realise there are several week’s unopened mail and possible something important is lost inside that may need a response.
Now, I have to confess, I have many unhelpful financial habits, but I do generally stay on top of my post and my emails. That said, I’ve helped others with this and I’ve completed tasks I didn’t want to do enough times to have some useful tips.
If you want to tackle your envelope mountain, but the thought feels very overwhelming, here is my gentle guide to getting it done.
Paper can’t bite!
This sounds funny, but our bodies respond to anything we perceive as an emotional threat as if it were a physical threat. Adrenaline and cortisol flooding your system to help you fight or run away will not help you make wise, long term choices about your admin and organisation.
Remind yourself you are not about to fight a crocodile. You are simply dealing with some bits of paper.
What’s more, many people have a tendency to catastrophise about the unknown. There’s a reason that horror movies often don’t show us the monster. What we imagine is so often worse than reality. Once you know what is real, you can deal with it. Until you know, you can’t.
The mountain is actually a molehill.
90% of your post is unnecessary guff and when you open it you’ll find it can go straight in the recycling. It’s either advertising, or duplicates or it’s out of date. There is so much less here to deal with than you expect.
Get a buddy
Do you know anyone else who might have tedious life admin to do? Could you buddy up and do it at the same time? It doesn’t have to be in-person. As long as you’re working at the same time and checking in periodically via a video call or text messages, that will give you a boost. The key is to know that someone else is also tackling their crap at the same time you’re tackling yours. Misery love company and it can help you stay focused and push through when you know someone else is doing the same.
Regulate your nervous system and get in a positive frame of mind
Stretch your shoulders out, jump around a bit, walk around the block, take a few deep breaths and release them slowly. Make a hot drink. Put on some inspiring music. Speak kindly to yourself. You’re not a stupid, lazy, idiot who’s bad at being an adult and can’t even be trusted to open their post. You are an imperfect human like all the other imperfect humans. What’s past is past and what matters are the choices you make now. You are going to open this post because doing so will make your life better and you deserve a better life. It’s time to show yourself love and care by removing this source of stress from your home.
You can open mail and not read it.
Try that! Open your mail and sort it by sender without actually reading the contents.
Take breaks if you need to
Stand up and stretch at intervals. Get a breath of fresh air. It’s ok not to just blast through in a single sitting. (Of course, if you get into a flow or you’re neurodivergent and become hyperfocused, go with it!)
You may want to try the Pomodoro Technique of using a timer to measure out bursts of intense activity (typically 20-25min) with short breaks (3-5min) in between.
You can organise and still not read
Once your post is sorted by sender, sort each sender pile into date order. You still ddont’ have to read the contents.
Start an action list
As you sort the mail you’re going to come across items that need responses or other actions on your part, so it’s a good idea to be ready to make a list of actions as you sort. Grab your favourite notetaking tool whether that’s digital notes, voice notes or old fashioned pen and paper and be ready to capture whatever comes out when you actually begin to read what you’ve been sent.
Have your containers for sorted mail ready
Have a container for the mail you don’t need to keep ready to hand. You may have a shredder, in which case have that nearby and emptied ready to go. That said, it’s common to have too much to put through before a domestic shredder will become filled up and overheated. It’s wise to have a sack or two to contain the mail you intend to shred/recycle/throw out.
You should also have a couple of files for the mail you need to keep. One for mail you want to keep but may have no immediate actions like statements or updated legal terms, another for letters that require action. If you don’t have files, large envelopes will do. Even a couple of bulldog clips to keep like items together is better than just plopping them in a pile.
Begin where it’s easiest
Which letters do you feel most neutral about reading? If there are any letters that you think you will enjoy reading, try saving those for last, as a reward. However if there is a sender about which you feel entirely neutral, this are a good place to start.
As you read the most recent letter from this sender, ask yourself if you need to take any action. Do you have to keep the letter? Is it a statement of account, a legal notification or similar? Or is it just marketing or other useless information? If you don’t have to keep it, shred it and/or recycle it straight away. If there’s an action, add the action to the list and file the letter in the action file. If you just need to keep it, pop it in the “to keep” file, ready to be filed properly later.
If there are duplicate letters for the same action, just keep the most recent and discard the rest.
Celebrate the small wins
Celebrate every time you finish a sender pile. Dab. Do a goofy dance. Strut around like Freddie Mercury singing “We will rock you”. Play air guitar. Give yourself a high five. Whatever will make this process feel just a little lighter and give you a moment to recognise all the work you’ve done, do it!
Go at your own pace
If you’d rather blast through everything in one sitting and be done with it all, go for it. If you’d rather break it into blocks and do some today and some another time, that’s good too. If you choose the latter, I’d suggest actually picking a time and putting it in your calendar as half-completed jobs have a tendency to linger if you don’t set a time for them.
Either way, remember to be kind to yourself as you go. You’re doing this because having a pile of unopened post is stressful and you deserve a life free of stress. You deserve to have the information you need to deal with any issues that arise and not be ambushed by them. That is what you are achieving by opening your post. Well done. I’m proud of you.
If you’d like me to help you get rid of your envelope mountain, pop a time into my calendar and we can work out a plan of action to get those papers sorted and gone.
Reluctant meal planning for low effort frugality
Is meal-planning worth it?
When I realised that meal-planning saved us nearly 40% on our grocery bill, I was shocked. I thought I was already being pretty thrifty. After all, I compare prices carefully looking at £/ml or £/kg rather than assuming that similar sized packages were directly comparable. I mostly resist the discounted items, unless I know we’ll eat them. I default to generics and own brands and only buy a name brand when I knew it really made a difference. I used to go through the supermarket counting in my head “Two people means 14 portions of food for dinners over the week. I’ve got enough chicken thighs for four portions plus a tin of chickpeas, that’s another two portions. That’s three main dishes. Plus vegetable for five portions and we had some leftover salad we can have tonight that’s seven plus…”
What I’m trying to say is, I wasn’t throwing money around. Meal-planning took my thrift to a new level.
I’m not sure why I resisted the idea of meal-planning other than that cooking has always been a creative outlet for me and it felt limiting to plan overly. However, the longer my sweetie lived with me, the clearer it became that he wasn’t always keen on my more experimental dishes and the more I turned to recipes. No complaints, using more recipes has taught me to be a better cook. It also got me meal planning. After all you can’t follow a recipe if you don’t have all the ingredients. How do you have all the ingredients? You decide what you’re going to make before you shop.
So, I began meal-planning and a couple of things quickly became clear:
When we only bought exactly what we needed for the meals we had planned (plus sundries for breakfast, lunch and snacks) we saved a fortune on food that I didn’t even know we’d been wasting.
Meal-planning was boring and took much longer than it seemed like it should. I needed a system to deal with that or I was going to run out of steam very, very quickly.
What are my meal-planning strategies for long term success?
Plan multiple weeks
The first thing to do is to realise that meal-planning one week at a time is asking for trouble. It means you have to find the energy and creativity to make a new plan every single week and who has the time and energy for that? There are so many better things to do. Take a nap, cut your toenails, literally, almost anything.
Instead block out a morning or an afternoon to work out plans for at least four weeks. Once you have four weeks you have enough to rotate between them without everyone getting completely sick of eating the same flipping thing all the time. You can add more weeks later and i advise you to do so.
Use technology
The whole process is a lot easier with technology on your side. I use an app called Recipe Keeper for meal-planning. It can import recipes from websites or scan them from cook-books and then you can tag and categorise them. You can then assign a recipe to a date and mealtime. The app will generate shopping lists, to which you can add toothpaste, bleach etc, and print if you prefer a paper list. There are loads of these kinds of apps. Feel free to experiment until you find one you like.
If you’re not using an app, make list of recipes in a spreadsheet and, for goodness sakes, include details of where to find the recipes in your list. If they’re online, include the links. If they’re in books, include book titles and page numbers. If you must use a paper list, well, you do you. You still need to write down where to find your recipes.
Categorise all the things
OK, so you’ve gathered the recipes you are happy to put in your initial four week rotation. (Remember you can add weeks later, my rotation is up to about nine weeks now.) Now categorise those dishes into groups that make sense to you. Some possible categories: chicken, fish, curries, stir fries, casseroles, slow cooked, pasta, vegetarian, under 20mins. The key to your categories is you want them to be fairly broad, because you are going to use one or two categories for each day of the week.
This is my next big tip for making meal planning easy. When your week has a pattern it makes it much easier to slot dishes into that pattern. It also means that when it comes time to cook you know what category of dish you’ll be making by what day it is.
Our week goes something like this:
Monday - Indian dal with flat breads. I have sooooo many dal recipes - thank you Internet!
Tuesday - East Asian chicken or tofu curry - usually using a ready made curry paste. Quick, simple, tasty.
Wednesday - Pork - usually chops or stir fry. Again something quick and simple.
Thursday - Another vegetarian dish - either the other half of the packet of tofu or something with chickpeas.
Friday - Wild card - maybe fish cakes or pasta or bangers and mash or burgers.
Saturday/Sunday - usually something that takes a bit more time to cook like a stew or braised dish, or else a roast dinner.
Work around the rest of your life
Your plan does not have to look like my plan, but I do want to point out the timing element. Dishes that take time to cook happen on the weekend. Week nights are for relatively fast meals. Pay attention to the schedule of your life when planning your meals. Also consider your energy levels through the week. I have the least interest in cooking on Tuesday nights, so protein plus veggies plus curry paste plus coconut milk is about my level. On weekends I enjoy taking the time to make something to make something a bit more involved. Do what works for you. If your kids do after school sports one day and always come home starving give them something big and solid that day. If there’s a day you are always rushed off your feet then do yourself a favour and put in something minimal effort.
Shop to the plan
This is where the magic happens. When you start shopping to a plan you find your trolley looks weirdly empty. It’s ok, you’ll get used to it. Because you are only buying the ingredients you need to make the things in this week’s you plan, you’re not ‘stocking up’ on random items as you go. It’s amazing how much less you buy when you do this.
Iterate
The chances are your first meal plan is not going to be perfect. That’s fine. Once you have the broad structure in place you can make tweaks as you go. Maybe swap one or two nights around. Maybe take out a recipe that isn’t as popular as you thought. Maybe double up a favourite across more than one week. You might like to keep in a ‘Wild Card’ night like I have, so you don’t get bored and you can try out new recipes.
You might get really into meal-planning and find yourself planning breakfasts and lunches too. All power to you I say!
Do you have any meal-planning tips I’ve missed? I’d love to hear them in the comments.
My top three financial tasks to schedule today
Do you put off doing your finances because, frankly, there's always something more fun to do?
Do you end up saying “I’ll do it later” and going back to scrolling Instagram instead?
Does all of this leave you with a vague feeling of self-disgust and impending financial doom?
Do you ask yourself why you can’t just force yourself to get it done?
Once you get going with money management, watching your numbers get better can be rewarding. Seeing the debt drop and the savings rise feels really good. There are even ways to make a game out of some kinds of money-saving. In general, though, managing money is admin. There's no getting around it so you might as well own it.
In fact, I think the expectation that doing your finances should somehow be super easy or enjoyable can be counterproductive. Expecting it to be kind of a drag, and then just buckling up and getting on with it is honestly more effective.
The trouble with financial admin is that it's easy to procrastinate over it. Insurances auto-renew, deals on credit, savings and utilities expire - but you still get the service, and there's always something more exciting to do than track your spending against your plan.
Letting things just happen to you is easy, but it’s disempowering and it costs you money. Your spending creeps up and you don’t notice. You don’t spot frauds or mistaken charges against your account. You miss out on deals and end up overpaying.
Scheduling time to catch up on financial tasks can help make sure you don't give in to that urge to sack it off and watch telly.
Here are my top three types of tasks to schedule:
A regular time to analyse your spending for potential cost savings - about 15-20 min a week;
A regular time to check for unexpected payments from your bank account - about 5-10min a week;
Six weeks before any contract or deal ends time to research and find a new one - about one hour each time.
Knowing you have an appointment with your money means you can switch off and not worry about it the rest of the time.
I'm all about helping my clients make life easier for themselves. Letting your calendar help you manage your money is a really good start.
For more on how avoid procrastinating on financial tasks, or anything else really, check out this episode of my podcast, Squanderlust.