Lose Some Weight
Did you know that the average American receives 41 pounds of junk mail every year? If you can reduce the volume of junk mail you receive, you and the environment will benefit. The less junk mail you receive, the less time you have to waste sorting through unessential communications and the more time you will have to focus on what is truly important to you. When I lived in Switzerland, people would put stickers on their mail box with the statement “Bitte, keine reklame!” (meaning, “Please, no advertisements!”). The postal worker could not then put sales circulars, catalogs or other unsolicited junk mail in the post boxes so marked. Such mail would be returned to the sender at his expense. I hope that we can soon pass legislation in the U.S. providing such consumer protections. Meanwhile, there are steps that you can take to reduce your volume of junk mail. The Center for a New American Dream even offers a kit to do it for you, or you can sign up for Catalog Choice to opt out of mailers. In Prepare for the Worst, Plan for the Best: Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Small Businesses (Wiley, second edition, 2008), I offer some suggestions to contact credit card companies and mailing list providers to substantially reduce the volume of unwanted mail you receive. It is bad enough receiving junk mail in your office during normal business operations, but this is certainly a burden you don’t want to have should you find yourself displaced and temporarily operating from a remote location in the event of a disaster.
