Enter the Paper Diet. This new campaign launched by Manilla.com (a site that helps you organize all your paperless bill payments in one secure place) encourages people to cut back on paper use, with the goal of losing a million pounds of paper clutter by Earth Day. Besides saving 13,000 trees for every 65,000 people that take the Paper Diet pledge, Manilla estimates that half a million hours will be saved that would otherwise be spent managing paper. Yes, please! Try these 3 Paper Diet tricks for getting your paper clutter in check. Visit their site or Facebook page for more tips and to sign the pledge (and send tongue-in-cheek e-cards, like the one above). Leave it outside. Make it a habit to sort your mail in your garage or entryway, before you can set it down somewhere inside. Toss any unwanted paper into a bin to be recycled or shredded. That way, the extra clutter never even enters your living space. Toss your sticky notes. This probably sounds familiar: You jot down a reminder on a sticky note, only to misplace the note (or worse yet, discover an old one and think “what was that about?”). Rather than deal with dozens of little pieces of paper, try an electronic app to keep your notes and reminders organized. Evernote (Evernote.com) lets you store your ideas, to-do lists, and favorite web pages in a personal account, and then access them from any computer or mobile device. Opt out of junk mail. The “Do Not Call” registry has done wonders for keeping telemarketers at bay, but there’s no equivalent “Do Not Mail” list. Until that happens—if it ever does—the nonprofit service Catalog Choice (CatalogChoice.org) helps consumers opt out of catalogs, credit card offers, phone books, and other mail you’d rather not get. Report your unwanted mail through their online form or mail-in service, and they’ll tell the company (there are over 4,000 participating businesses and organizations) to stop sending it to you. Companies are obliged to comply with the request, or they risk violating their own terms of service.
