"If I open it I'll have to deal with it"

The brown envelope has stayed shut since Tuesday for a reason, and the reason is that a shut envelope is a thing that hasn't happened yet. Open it and it becomes a task. Leave it and it's just an envelope.

Russell Golman, David Hagmann and George Loewenstein, in 2017, reviewed the research on why people avoid information, and found that they do it even when the information is useful, free, and would change nothing about what they'd have to do, and that the avoidance is often costly. The shut envelope is a small clear case. Whatever's in it is already true. The renewal date is the renewal date whether or not you've read it. Not opening it changes nothing about the item and everything about your knowledge of it, and the knowledge is the only part you can act on.

An earlier book in this series is about money post specifically, and if the envelopes you're not opening are about money you can't pay, that book and the debt charities in the preface are where to go, and this chapter is about the other envelopes. The council. The school. The DVLA. The optician's reminder. The ones where the content is almost always a small task with a date, and where not opening it turns a small task with a date into an unknown task with a shrinking date.

Look at the two sizes. Opening is ten seconds. Dealing, for most envelopes, is under four minutes, because the content is a form to sign or a date to write down or nothing at all, and quite often nothing at all. A fair proportion of unopened post, opened, turns out to require no action, and has been carried for a week as a task. The shut envelope isn't protecting you from dealing with it. It's making you deal with it on the side, every time you pass it, in the form of the carry, without ever getting the relief of finding out it was a leaflet.

There's a version of this with email. The message left unread because reading it will commit you to replying. Same shape, same answer. The reply is the same size whether you've read the message or not, and unread it's a task with a fog on it, and read it's four sentences.

Open it at the door. That's the whole of the advice, and it's in chapter 20. The dealing is ten minutes at most or it goes on the list, and the opening is what turns an unknown weight into a known size, and known sizes are almost always smaller.