Would a Paperless Life Make You Happy?

As a follow-up on my previous post A Smart System To Process Your Paperwork I would like to take a closer look at what can be done to get rid of as much paper as possible. A few practical tips.

Eliminate

First of all it’s a good idea to eliminate as much of the incoming paper as possible. Let’s take some time to make a list of all sources of paper sent to us. Bills, obligations and notices, promotional material, things like that. Do we really need them? Do we read all that stuff?

A lot of the information banks and telecom providers send can also be viewed online. A lot of companies offer the possibility to unsubscribe from these mailings and just send an email with a link to the information. If companies send us promotional offers we can let them know we’d rather read the information on their website. If we don’t find a way to unsubscribe we can give them a call and tell them so.

A Filing System

So now we got rid of a lot of unnecessary paper, what are we going to do with what’s left? Having a good filing system is essential. In case we need something after a year we don’t want to search all archives in order to find it. There are many ways you can create a filing system. An example:

Use an accordion binder with tabs. Label them using the categories of your choice. Label the first compartment ‘Inbox’. Divide your files over the categories. New files can go directly into the right category or can be put in the Inbox to be filed later. If you’re familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology this might sound familiar.
We can use one accordion binder for a specific period (i.e. a month or a semester) depending on how much paperwork there is to process.

A Paperless Life

Now organizing our paperwork is one thing, but getting rid of paper totally is another. Is it possible? In A Smart System To Process Your Paperwork I wrote there will always be paper in our lives, because there will always be people, companies and organizations sending us paperwork. But do we need to keep everything? Would it not be possible to import all this paper to the digital realm?

There certainly are systems that provide this possibility. One of my favorite applications is DEVONthink. The ‘Pro Office’ version of this software has built in scanner support with OCR. This means we can import documents directly from our scanner and they will be searchable because the OCR analyzes the text for us. So basically we get a fully searchable digital version of the document by just pressing one button. And then, away with the paper!

Back Up

In case we would decide to work with a fully digital archive, (a paperless office), one of our biggest concerns becomes having secure backups of all our data. We might consider having a second backup online. Hard disks don’t live forever.

Personally I like to keep just a little bit of paper in my life. I do like paper, just not too much of it. I really like my Moleskine notebook and never use my computer to take notes. I really like to be able to scribble on something wherever I am, it makes it easier to think.
And last I’d advice to make sure the old paper gets recycled when you digitize your whole archive!

Do you think you can have a paperless life? Please leave a comment!

Photo by danie;