Slash Your Reading Piles

Take stock of your reading materials and pare down your piles.

On a piece of paper - or better yet, your computer - jot down all of your reading material you receive for one month. Include newspapers, magazines, professional journals, newsletters, email newsletters and so on. Using a scale between 1 and 10 (1 being low; 10 being high), rate each item's value to you, personally.

Any item whose value is under 6 should be re-evaluated and possibly deleted (or unsubscribed) from your reading pile. If you don't have patience to do this for a month, you could also just take current inventory of your pile(s). This works just as well. HINT: If you have 5 or more unread back issues of any one publication, chances are you either don't have time for it or don't find value in it. Get rid of it, now!

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Abby Marks Beale is founder of The Corporate Educator, a professional speaking and training company specializing in helping with busy people work smarter, faster and just plain better. Go to www.TheCorporateEducator.com.