I think most people, do better when they open, look at, and deal with physical, postal mail rather than email.

For me it’s the opposite.

After growing up with email and having it be a critical part of my life for so many years, I can read, process and respond to email wickedly fast.

I use a pre-screener that lets me quickly archive and mark spam, and I know the Gmail shortcut keys instinctively. Getting to Inbox Zero in the morning generally takes minutes.

On the flip side, if someone hands me a piece of postal mail or paper, I literally have no idea what to do with it.

Paper blows around in the wind if it’s not weighted down. Paper is flammable. It gets lost in stacks or under things. There’s no way to set a reminder about them (unless you go all out and use a physical “tickler file”).

I use paper for grocery lists and sometimes jotting down quick notes that I’ll transfer to digital later (although I’m using Google Keep more and more for that).

But if something is important and requires action, I want it digital, and I want it synchronized to a cloud-based system so there’s very little chance of losing it.

Any moderately important piece of paper gets scanned and moved to a folder synced to Google Drive or Dropbox (I use both).

With Canada terminating home mail delivery, I suspect more and more people will become like me and expect digital communication as the norm.