Other Office Equipment

Shred it, Baby!

Getting and staying organized is as important and flossing every day. A ridiculous analogy you may think, but you know what happens when you don't floss… tartar builds up. If you don't get rid of that stuff your teeth and gums will decay. Same thing goes with all the unwanted stuff in your life, especially papers. If you don't "floss" the unnecessary files and mail and general paper out of your life on a regular basis, your personal records will decay.

Junk mail is one of the chief contributors to the pile up of unwanted papers. The average person gets only 1.5 personal letters each week, compared to 10.8 pieces of junk mail. That amount of mail can be overwhelming and certainly cause a lot of unwanted clutter in your home. The first step towards ridding yourself of this mail detritus is to join a service that can get rid of it for you without any hassle on your part. I suggest joining a junk mail stopping service such as www.greendimes.com. For a small fee they stop all your unwanted junk mail, including catalogs, and they even plant trees with your membership. Now why didn't I think of that? Stopping your junk mail is not only healthy for you, it's vital for the environment. Did you know that 100 million trees are ground up each year for unsolicited mail? Junk mail wastes 28 billion gallons of water for paper processing each year to generate 4.5 million tons of junk mail! Another service you can use to get your name removed from unwanted credit cards and insurance offers is OptOutPrescreen.com or call 1(888)5-OPT-OUT.

For the rest of the mail you want to get rid of, as well as personal papers, financial records, even old love letters, avail yourself of one of the best organizational tools known to man, the shredder. It's your organizational dental floss. Why not just throw the stuff out you say? Because it's essential to destroy the information on personal papers to avoid the rampant practice of identity theft that plagues thousands of Americans each year. Believe me, you don't want to be a victim of identity theft, it can cost you a lot of money and years of aggravation.

Now some of you, like Gertrude Stein, may think a shredder is a shredder is a shredder. Now you see it, now it's in a thousand little pieces. Right? Wrong. There are many different qualities and features to a shredder, not to mention the look of the thing, and you should see what features are important to you besides the safe disposal of your personal information.