Reader Tip: Dealing with Magazines

Do you subscribe to a lot of magazines? It is very easy to let your magazine collection get out of control. Maybe you are familiar with this scenario:

You get a new magazine in the mail and the first thing you do is skim through it. You notice several articles that catch your eye and you want to read later. When you have a few minutes, you scan through the magazine again reading what you have time for. You then put the magazine aside and tell yourself you’ll look at it later because you really want to keep that article about buying name brand shoes at a discount. The next thing you know, your pile of magazines is out of control and you have no idea which magazine that article is in.

Yep, I do this too. I used to be really good at tearing out the articles I wanted to keep and I had a special file box where I would put them. Well, life happened and I haven’t don this in awhile.

A comment from one of my readers named Peg, inspired me to get going again and organize my magazine articles:

I’m a sucker for magazines and subscribe to a jillion of them — Organize (of course), knitting, quilting, travel, news, etc, etc.

I’ve found one method for dealing with them that works the best for me: I sit down with a magazine THE DAY IT COMES and quickly go through each page, tearing them off as I go. When I come to something that I want to keep (like a pattern) or to read later, I put it to the side. I DON’T READ IT AT THAT TIME. The goal is to get through it quickly and get it off my desk.

When I’ve gone through the entire thing, I find I usually only have a dozen or so pages left to deal with. The patterns/reference articles go in the appropriate file folders and the “read later” articles go in my “Take to work and read at lunch” envelope. I also keep an “Internet” file folder for those articles that reference something I want to check out on the Web.

If I don’t follow this method, I find that I am soon overwhelmed in back issues and it takes almost an entire Sunday to plow through them.

Great tip Peg! Follow this simple method and you will know exactly where all your favorite articles are. Now doesn’t that sound nice?