The answer to this flood of mail isn’t in better handling methods (though this is also a good thing), it’s in getting less mail.

So here are my recommendations — though they won’t work for everyone, and they’re not comprehensive.

It’s simply a process of systematically stopping the mail at the source.

Look at all your mail, both personal and business, and figure out how to stop it from coming. Some examples:

1. Catalogs. Email or call the company, request to be removed from their mailing list. Takes a few minutes each, so just do a few each day until you’re done.

2. Junk mail. This is a tough one, but here’s a good guide.

3. Bank or other statements. Go to the bank’s website and request for electionic statements or call the bank and request that they stop sending statements. If you do your banking online, as I do, it’s always available.

4. Bills. Set up autopay, where the utility or other company bills you straight from your bank account or credit card. Failing that, pay the bill in advance as far as you can. Request e-bills or no bill at all if you autopay.

5. Checks. If you regularly get checks from a company (and if you do, congrats!), ask them to direct deposit into your account, or send via Paypal.

6. Contracts. If you get sent contracts to sign, ask the company to use an online service for e-signatures. They’re faster and perfectly legal — I’ve used them many times.

7. Invoices. Ask the company to email the invoice or use an online invoicing service.

8. Correspondence. Umm. Email? Not sure why some companies still use paper business letters instead of email, but ask them to email you instead.

9. Magazines and newspapers. Cancel your subscriptions, read online.

There are probably many other types of mail I’m missing, but you get the point. For just about every type of paper mail, there’s a digital alternative (or, you might not need any alternative — just stop it from being sent).

I haven’t completely eliminated incoming mail. Some companies are just slow to adopt electronic alternatives. But I’ve eliminated most, and it’s been a huge relief. I highly recommend it.

The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” - Socrates

In that one little line, Socrates summed up one of the major problems with our modern society, and offered a simple solution.

Pretty brilliant, I’d say.

In fact, he negated the need for me to write more, but stubborn as I am, I will proceed. I’d like to talk about this capacity to enjoy less.

Is it difficult to enjoy less? No, not really, but it takes a change in mindset, which as with many such changes takes time and adaptation.

If you enjoy chocolate ice cream, as I do, when confronted with a tub of it would you also enjoy eating as much of the tub as possible? I know that’s what many of us do when faced with delicious food.

But what if you learned to enjoy just a few bites of the ice cream? And with each bite, savor the flavor, the coldness, the creaminess, the chocolatiness. (Yes, that’s a word, spell-checker – I made it up.)

If you love clothes, instead of buying more and more each weekend, can you learn to cull your wardrobe into a few quality, beautiful pieces that you can wear often, and enjoy more?

The same applies with anything we love … including online reading and communicating (email, Twitter, Facebook, forums). We often seem obsessed with more of it. But instead, consider reading just the quality stuff, and if a blog or Twitter feed doesn’t deliver quality consistently, consider dropping it.

Learn to love less television, movies, chatter, spending, shopping, eating out, junk food, technology, consumption, productivity. You get the idea.

When you focus on enjoying less, you focus on full enjoyment. You learn to be content with little, and when you do that, a life of happiness is at your disposal. The only limit to your happiness, then, is how much you can learn to enjoy less.

The technique is “unfriending”, which was the New Oxford American Dictionary’sWord of the Year for 2009 (actually it was “unfriend”).

Why is this important to a minimalist? Because some of us would like to participate in the emerging social web of Twitter, Facebook, blogging and the like, without being overwhelmed by the huge stream of information that’s almost inevitably consumed when you participate.

The trend seems to be to follow or “friend” thousands of people, regardless of whether you know them or not. I’m guilty of this: when I signed up for a Facebook account, I began to automatically add people who made friend requests, and ended up with well over 1,000 friends — most of whom I don’t know. On Twitter, I began to do the same thing, but recently began to unfollow people I don’t know, probably offending a few people in the process.

The trend of following lots of people has its pros and cons — one of the pros is that you get to know more people than you normally would have. You also spread your influence and have your content spread more widely, if that’s something you care about.

But the con is that it’s hard to keep up with so much social information. Another con is that the relationships you do form become necessarily thin and superficial, because you can’t form deep bonds with thousands and thousands of people.

And so, consider unfriending or unfollowing people you don’t know. Or at least know of — it’s fine to follow someone whose content interests you, if you keep that within reasonable limits.

Here’s what happens. When you unfollow or unfriend people, you might offend them. But you’ll also greatly simplify your incoming stream of information, and be able to actually closely follow the updates of the people you are friends with.

And even better, you’ll start to have some real conversations, and form real relationships.

I don’t know what a good number of friends would be, but I’d guess it would be in the dozens — definitely below 100. I’m not there yet, as I said, but it’s something I’ve been considering.

Unfriending might offend people, but it’s greatly liberating.

Twitter started with a brilliant idea of simplicity:

• Keep tweets to 140 characters or less, forcing people to be brief and to the point (unlike emails or blog posts).
• Have one stream to read, as opposed to multiple things to check on.
• Make it simple and easy to tweet or reply, from anywhere.

And people loved the simplicity, and 3rd-party developers used it well to make great apps. Twitter’s simplicity is one reason it’s a better user experience than Facebook or MySpace.

Now Twitter has added lists and the new Retweet feature, and it seems they might be looking to add more. Others are calling for them to remove the 140-character limit, allow more customizations to profile pages, and add a whole host of other features.

No. Please, Twitter, don’t give in to the feature requests, the tendency towards feature bloat. I will live with the lists and retweets, but please stop adding new features.

Instead, focus on making what you have better. Improve your infrastructure so you don’t have the Fail whale ever appear. Make your search better. Get rid of spam. Make it easier to unfollow people. Make the site even simpler.

Even better, move towards an open protocol — allow interconnectivity with Identi.ca and other services so we aren’t trapped into one service. People don’t like being trapped.

Keep it simple, Twitter.

“Obviously, the faster you can read, the more productive you can be. If you can double your reading speed, you can double your productivity.”

I disagree. I think you should read slower, and focus on doing things slower. It increases your effectiveness, which is a different definition of productivity than “doing things faster”.

The post’s argument was based on the idea that every project involves a lot of reading – background materials, books, blog posts, notes. It didn’t mention emails but that’s another area where reading faster might seem more productive.

And I’ll grant that if you can zip through that kind of reading, you’ll get the project done faster. And then you can zip through the next task and the next and the next, and zoom! You’re productive!

But productivity isn’t about speed, even if we’ve been led to believe it is. It’s about being effective. It’s about accomplishing things — and that’s about doing the most important things, not the most things.

When we speed through tasks and projects, we lose perspective. We forget what’s important and just try to do things as fast as possible.

Instead, pause. Think about what’s most important, what needs to be done the most. Then clear everything else out of the way, and focus. Do that one thing, but do it slowly, and do it very well.

If reading is important, focus on it, and do it slowly. It’ll be that much more enjoyable, and so will the project. And when you absolutely love what you’re doing, then productivity is a natural by-product.

Slow down, don’t speed up. Read slower — you’ll read less, but enjoy it more.

As Americans, we eat way too much (and waste too much food as well). As someone who was at least 60 lbs. overweight only a few years ago, I packed away the food as much as anyone else. I know what it’s like to eat entire pizzas by myself, eat super-sized fast-food meals plus extra nuggets and desserts and more, finish the gigantic heaping plates of food that the restaurants serve these days.

It’s too much, and it’s led to an obesity epidemic of alarming proportions. A large part of our healthcare crisis is because of our overeating.

A good part of the solution is to simply eat less.

A separate discussion should be about what we eat — organic, real foods, preferably grown locally, cooked at home with a minimum of processing and packaging. But today, I’d just like to talk about eating less.

It’s something I’ve focused on in my own life, especially recently, as I look at not only quality of food but quantity. I think we’ve been conditioned to eat without thinking, and in doing so to eat way too much. To stuff ourselves until we’re gorged. Which of course isn’t healthy at all.

My focus has been on eating until I’m not quite full. I eat until I feel like I want a little more, and then pause. Breathe. In about 10 minutes, I realize I’m satisfied and don’t need to eat any more.

Some tips if you’d like to accomplish this:

• Only take a small portion to start with. Don’t heap the plate.
• Eat slowly and mindfully.
• Pause between bites. Savor the food.
• Stop before you’re full, and wait.
• Drink water with your food.
• Eat every 2-3 hours, or embrace the hunger and wait a little longer.
• If you get hungry again soon after, eat a small snack — a fruit, some veggies, a handful of nuts.
• Cut back slowly. Don’t try to eat like a bird at first. Just eat a little less for now, adjust, and then cut back a little more.

Over time, you’ll change, and be able to eat less. You’ll be healthier (assuming you were eating too much before) and lighter and living more sustainably.