Sunday, August 14, 2011

My new project

Recently I have been working on cleaning out our catalogs and assigned Ram the task to call these catalog companies and take us off their mailing lists. About once a year I usually clean out the catalogs. But I recently got the idea to get off their mailing lists and was motivated by a few reasons.
1. When this project is done our recycling bin will be full or overflowing. If we move I don't want to deal with this during packing.
2. We receive A LOT of snail mail because our home address is the same as the church address. Some of the catalogs are related to church. We are a small church and Ram orders everything except for candles-the church doesn't need to receive these catalogs. With the possibility of our post office closing soon, it would be good to get this junk mail out of our box to make room for our real mail. Some of these church catalogs are still under the previous pastor's name.
3. We are on several mailing lists of various types-many homeschooling catalogs that I wrote and asked for several years ago when we were considering homeschooling that I've never ordered from, several teaching catalogs that somehow tracked me down when I moved, many baby and children's magazines that got our name when we had babies, some other catalogs that somehow got our name but we never ordered from. I now have my companies that we regularly order from and we can always look online if we want to order-I don't need to receive a snail mail copy. We'll stay on our e-mail lists to still receive notification of sales.
4. My parents are still receiving a few of the catalogs from when I was teaching and lived at home the first few years after college. I'm sure the school is still receiving some of the catalogs from when I taught there too. The school combined into another school and isn't even on site any more. I'm sure both the school and my parents would appreciate not having to deal with my catalogs any more. The funny one was a software catalog that Ram called to take me off the list, the company doesn't even exist any more! Another one he gave multiple addresses to them and they asked for my phone number-he said he didn't know the phone number since it has been over 8 years-the lady on the phone said they would remove all the addresses!
5. If we move it will be a nightmare for the local post office (who might be 7 miles away), the church, and the new pastor because our address is the same as the church. I would like to reduce this junk mail to make their job easier so hopefully we get our important mail forwarded to us at our new address.
6. Because we live rural we order a lot online, but there is no reason we need ALL these catalogs. I did stay on these mailing lists: Concordia Publishing House, Rainbow Resource, Sonlight, and Veritas Press. I figure if we want to order from Lands End, we can do it online. I know that after I order something I will be back on their list, but at that time it will be manageable to get off of one list instead of a hundred lists.

This is one of the tasks that should have been done a long time ago. You know the saying to take care of tasks immediately and not put them off? I have been overwhelmed with our snail mail for a long time. Doing this task is the first step to taking care of reducing our snail mail. It will feel so good to take that full recycling bin out on recycling day and get that out of my house. Then it will be manageable to get off of one list at a time when it comes in the mail. I have other projects like this to do, but this was one that I can see the progress right away plus I will see it daily in a few weeks when these catalogs don't show up in our mailbox.

1 comment:

Sue said...

I'm impressed! What a great thing you did! One of my son's high school teachers had an interesting method of tracking where all his junk mail came from. Any time he subscribed to a new magazine, he used a different middle initial. That helped him know who sold mailing lists!

BTW,after my kids were out of school, I suddenly started getting a home schooling catalog. No idea why! I called them and they removed my name. It was a rather large catalog, and the waste of it bothered me. They were very nice and took my name off.