It’s been said, and I believe it, that Napoleon only checked his mail once a month. His attitude was that most things would not be important 30 days into the future and the truly important things would still be important. Therefore checking his mail daily was a waste of his valuable time as the “Emperor” of Europe.

He was right.

There is absolutely no reason to check your snail mail (post office mail) every day, or even every week (with one exception I’ll get to in a minute). People end up wasting years of their lives going to the stupid mailbox every day just to sort through junk mail. It’s silly, especially in the digital age.

Once a month I grab a shoe box, I pull all the garbage out of my mailbox and dump it in. Not looking at it (and that’s important), I take it inside my house, and over my trash can (oh excuse me, my ‘recycle bin’) I start tossing all the crap. 99% of that mail ends up in the trash. That includes my utility bills, since I pay all of those online.

(Why do utility companies still insist on sending paper bills in the postal mail to people who pay online? Dumb.)

Even the 1% of mail that’s left gets high-speed scanned into my computer and then shredded, which is also then recycled, since I have a paperless office.

I suggest you resolve to visit your postal mailbox only once a month. If that’s just too horrific for you to contemplate, try taking it down to once every two weeks. After a few times you’ll realize one month is no big deal.

The one exception to this is if you actually receive checks in the mail. Obviously if you actually receive money in your physical mailbox for some reason, then fine, you can check it more often. If this is the case, I would suggest that you get a PO box at your post office or UPS Store or similar and have the important mail (like checks) mail go there.

You could also use it for things like getting DVDs from Netflix (although I would ask you why you’re bothering with DVDs when you can just stream everything these days…lots of people haven’t yet figured out that DVDs are old technology.)

This way you can visit your PO box on a regular basis if needed and still ignore your actual postal mailbox. Several other side benefits to this method include:

1. Privacy.

2. An address that never changes, even when you move.  (I happen to move at least once every 2 to 3 years so this is a godsend for me.)

3. A place to receive UPS and FedEx packages when you’re not around. (Another huge convenience.)

I highly recommend it.

Stop checking that mailbox!

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