Emptying the drawer

Before the new habits can work, there's the backlog to deal with. For many readers this is the hardest single thing in the book, so I'll go through it step by step. None of this is research. It's an order of doing things that keeps the task small at each stage.

Fix a time. Choose a morning or an afternoon when you're not tired, and put it in the diary. Don't attempt it late on a weekday evening. Allow ninety minutes. It will probably take less.

Get company if you can. Chapter 6 gave the reasons. Ask a friend, a sibling or your partner to be in the room. Tell them what you're doing. They don't have to read anything. If there's nobody, put the radio on and make a pot of tea. It helps to make the occasion as ordinary as you can.

Gather everything in one place. Empty the drawer on to the table. Add the pile by the microwave, the letters in your bag and the ones in the car. If a lot of your money post comes by email, open that folder on a screen beside you.

Open everything before you read anything. Slit every envelope, take out the contents, unfold them and put them in one stack, face up. Put the envelopes and the inserts straight into the recycling. This step matters more than it sounds. When you've finished it, there are no unopened envelopes in your house. They were what the dread attached to, and after ten minutes they're gone. What you have in their place is a stack of paper, which is much less frightening.

Sort into three piles. Go through the stack quickly, taking a few seconds for each sheet. The first pile is for recycling, and takes marketing, duplicates and notices that need nothing from you. The second is for filing, and takes statements, annual summaries and confirmations that you might want to keep. The third is for action, and takes anything with a sum to pay, a date to meet or a decision to make. When in doubt, put it in the action pile. If the example in chapter 4 is any guide, the action pile will be the smallest of the three.

Make one list from the action pile. Take a sheet of paper. For each item, write one line saying who it's from, how much, and by when. Where there's a run of letters about the same thing, as with the parking charge, only the latest counts. Staple the rest behind it. Now put the lines in date order, soonest first. Put anything already overdue at the top.

Look at the list. It's the whole of what the drawer contained. A dread of no particular size has become, say, five lines on a sheet of paper. For most readers the total will be unwelcome and manageable. If it's more than that, chapter 14 is for you, and you're still better off than you were an hour ago, because you know what you're facing.

Deal with the top three today. Start at the top and work down. Some you can simply pay, online, in a few minutes each. For anything you can't pay in full, or that seems wrong, ring the number on the letter. You don't need a speech. "I've fallen behind with my post and I've only just opened this. Can you tell me where things stand and what my options are?" People in those call centres have that conversation many times a day. Write on the letter what was agreed, who you spoke to and the date.

Put dates in the diary for the rest, within the next week. Don't leave them to be got round to. Give each one a day.

Put the action pile somewhere visible when you've finished, in a tray or a clip on the fridge. It shouldn't go back in the drawer. The drawer is going to be given another job, perhaps holding tea towels.

If you shared the task with someone, thank them, and consider telling them what you found. Chapter 5 mentioned that monitoring works better when it's reported to someone.

People who do this are usually surprised by two things. The first is how short it was, since a drawer that's been dreaded for months often takes an hour. The second is how they feel afterwards, which is a lightness they hadn't expected. They hadn't noticed how heavy the unopened post had been until it was opened.