Wow! What I thought would take an hour to sort through actually took me 3 1/2!
Granted my focus wasn’t dedicated to my task, but it was still unexpected.
What were you doing?
Well, I was organizing my postcards and letters.
For those of you who are just tuning in, I joined Postcrossing in January 2014. Postcrossing is a post card exchange program that has just under 500,000 members in 216 countries. Everything is done through the website. You start off requesting to send 5 postcards. Each sender receives an ID number that you place on the post card you’re sending so the person receiving the post card can register it. You need to send these 5 postcards before you receive any. After that, depending on the amount of postcards you send out, you can send out more, which is what you want because you’ll receive just as much. It’s a fun program with no personal information revealed unless you choose to. Your mailing address is only revealed to the person who will be sending you a postcard.
In addition to the postcard exchange, you can choose to do direct swaps. What this means is that you’re inviting others across the global to message you for direct post card exchange in which you reveal your addresses to each other, no registration number. Some members choose not to participate, others do. I’m one who’s open to direct swaps … of course.
Anyway, I have to catch up on some letters and I decided to hunt down my stationary. Well, that turned into “Hm, why doesn’t this postcard have a receive date?” and “why doesn’t this letter have a number?” Next thing you know, I’m going through my postcards to see if there were any more postcards I didn’t put a receive date on and going through my pen pal letters to see if there were any more letters I didn’t put a number on. Thankfully they were newly received, within the past month or two, so I could backtrack easy enough. But then since they were new, I had to reorganize them because they weren’t in their respective places.
Oh yes, I have system for organizing my letters, postcards, and stationary. It’s not a complex system and it’s nothing more than dating and number items, but still, it’s a system that helps me track my pen pals from my Postcrossing mail, my direct swaps from my registered, and everything in between.
So …
what started off as a hunt for my stationary turned into a cleaning and auditing of my entire letter-writing station.
And turned a 15 minute task into a 3 1/2 hour project.
And now, time to write!