Whether it’s piles of documents on your desk at work, bills strewn across surfaces at home or files clogging up your home office, facing mountains of paperwork on a daily basis is a real problem. Not only is it stressful to see them cluttering your surfaces, it also makes you more inefficient as you have to sort through various documents to find what you’re looking for. And, of course, using more paper than we need to is bad news for the environment too.
But with newspapers, magazines, advertising flyers, bills and work-related documents coming into your house every day, what can you do to reduce the amount of paper you face? Here are some tips:
- Remove yourself from advertising mailing lists www.directmail.com/junk_mail
- Don’t print emails or online documents – just read them on screen
- When printing is essential, use both sides of the paper
- Recycle documents you no longer need
- Cancel magazine or newspaper subscriptions and get your news or gossip fix online
- Ask banks and utility companies to send bills and statements online rather than paper versions
- At work, share documents online rather than printing copies for different people. This is also useful if documents are changing regularly, as you will always have access to the latest version.