My clients and a lot of households in general struggle with reading material. Newspapers, magazines, journals, and on and on. Most people are so busy that they don’t get around to finishing up their magazines within a day or two, and then the piles start to grow. I mostly see piles on desks, but they also can accumulate on coffee tables, nightstands and other open areas as well.

People tell me that they feel as though this material is urgent and then place it somewhere where it can be seen easily. The problem with this, however, is that piles of unread material can simply add to a person’s stress. When I work with these piles with clients, it turns out that most of their reading material is really not that urgent after all.

I usually tell people that reading material is generally not critical, but it can, unfortunately, come with its own kind of baggage: We feel like we’ve lost an opportunity or are not keeping up with our professional education.

That’s why I tell my clients that it’s important to keep reading material at a realistic level. If you accumulate more magazines and journals than you can read, your sense of guilt can rise to very high levels.

My suggestion for this? A basket. Simple, yet effective. And it does two things, it keeps a limit on your reading material and it contains the clutter. When the basket is full, you need to get rid of some of your reading material if you want some new stuff. And keeping reading material in one location means that it’s not spread all over your desk, the kitchen table and your nightstand.

Just remember that reading material spread all over the place can have some really negative effects. Most of the time, something simple, like a basket, can help solve the problem.