Tracking My Snail Mail

     Hey everyone, I thought that for today’s blog post I’d combine two of my loves: planners and snail mail.

     It was a while back (so forgive me for not remembering who it was who suggested this topic), but one of my blog readers asked me to write about how I tracking my snail mail. Well, I’m finally getting around to that!

     So I sort of track my snail mail in two different places. You’re probably all familiar with the section in personal planner where I list all the mail I haven’t replied to or sent out yet:

     It usually shows up on the right hand page of my planner and features a simple checklist (with an adorable mail box sticker!). Whenever a piece of mail comes in that is something I need to reply to, I write the person’s name in here. After reading, of course, I put the letter in a pouch I have on the pin board in my bedroom and I could check that but I find it’s easy to forget about that so having a list in the planner I check everyday serves as a constant reminder to reply to my mail! If I don’t get around to replying to a piece of mail one week, the name just gets transferred to the next…and sometimes the next…until I do finally send out my mail.

     Speaking of which, I tend to try send my mail out in bulk on a Monday. I don’t really need to do it that way because almost everyday my mom goes to the shops and passes the post office or my sister passes a post box on the way to work, but sometimes I just find it easier to keep track of what I’m sending out when I send everything out on the same day.

     Which is why I have these lovely post office stickers on a Monday to remind me to send out my mail!

     So, that’s the tracking system you’re probably most familiar with seeing me use but I do have another, more detailed system, which I’ve been using for about two months now and it’s quite good. This one was in my A5 planner where I had my monthly spreads but it’s now in my Moleskine planner as that’s where I moved my monthly spreads too (I guess this is a sneak peak on that planner as I haven’t actually written a post on it yet!).

     So, here I have a table that I’ve drawn out for listing my incoming and outgoing snail mail and the date. I also have a cost section for my outgoing mail so I can keep some sort of track of how much money I need roughly each month for stamps. A table like this is really handy for keeping track of mail.

     When I do respond to the incoming mail, be it sending out a letter in response, rating someone on swap bot or registering a postcrossing card, a just put a little tick mark next to the person’s name so at a quick glance I can easily see if I’ve replied.

     So that’s how I go about tracking my incoming and outgoing snail mail. If you send and receive a lot of mail, tracking it in some way is a good idea because it’s easy to maybe forget about something or convince yourself you’ve responded but you really haven’t and what actually happened was that you dreamt that you did…I mean, not to speak from personal experience! It’s pretty easy to track your mail with a simple chart like I have and if paper planners aren’t your thing, I’m sure there’s plenty of ways to have a digital chart.

     Well, I hope this post has been useful to you.

     I’m curious, to fellow snail mailers out there, do you keep track of your mail?