New Year's Resolution - Dealing with paper

This may sound a bit silly or even crazy, but my New Year's Resolution for 2009 involves paper. In the new year I am going to attempt to greatly reduce the amount of paper in my life. I feel as if most paper in our house is manageable and easy to recycle . . . the newspaper, phone books, cereal boxes . . . it's all the mail that we get that seems to become an overwhelming paper problem at times. Bank statements, bills, credit card offers and just plain old annoying junk mail.

I am going to attempt to reduce (and recycle any that I do collect) the mail in our house. These are the ways in which I am going to do so:

1. To subscribe to paperless bills from those that offer this service. At the moment we have quite a few bills that are done this way, bank statements, auto and home owner's insurance and phone bill, but there are others that we can eliminate the constant stream of paper.

2. There are services which you can subscribe to help eliminate junk mail by simply taking you off their mailing list. For example the Red Plum advertising inserts that we receive at our house mid-week can easily be stopped.

3. This is the big one. I am going to attempt to only touch each piece of paper once. So, once the mail is read, it will be immediately sorted into recycling, filing or shredding and that's it. The only paper I will touch again will be a payment stub for a bill, but referring to number one, I shouldn't have any payment stubs if they are all paperless (except for our water bill, because I don't think the City of Columbus is quite up to date on this one, but I will check).

Happy New Year!