How to go paperless in 9 steps

Desire to get Eliminating paper from your life is easy. Following through on this promise to yourself is difficult.

I’ve been mostly paperless for nearly 15 years, and the trick for me has been to think about it the same way I think about taking care of my teeth.

Staying organized is a kind of hygiene. It’s almost never a one-time cleaning job. So think Dental hygiene. We learn how to brush our teeth twice a day, floss once a day, and visit the dentist every six months to catch problems before they get worse. However, if you do not follow this schedule strictly, you can still enjoy good dental health. You just have to do it enough. If you’re doing almost everything you’re supposed to do, but you miss a couple of days of flossing or are a few months late in scheduling your next cleaning, your teeth won’t suddenly fall out.

With cleanliness (or any type of maintenance), it doesn’t have to be perfect; You just have to be good enough.

Going paperless is a lot like that. Here, I want to share with you the plan I used to eliminate most of the paper from my life. This should get you started, but know ahead of time that you don’t have to stick to it exactly every moment of every day. You can mess up. You can forget. As long as you get into the habit most In time, you will find yourself Mostly Paperless in a few months.

9 steps to convert to paper

Decide where to keep digital papers. The natural option is to save them in a file Cloud storage servicesuch as Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. By saving them to a cloud storage service, you always have a backup. If you save files locally on your device, you may lose them all if your device is destroyed, lost, or stolen.

Create an inbox. Your inbox is nothing more than a folder where you’ll save recently scanned papers by default. If you’re very organized, you may have specific folders that you want to sort through for each sheet of paper you scan. This is great. But where do the files go when you’re feeling lazy or strapped for time? By creating an inbox, you have a place to catch all your files and where your scanned files stay until you can sort them.

Choose a scanning app, and don’t overthink it. At this time, the majority of scanning applications are well suited to converting paper to digital format. (Scan images is another story and requires a specialized app or scanner.) If your cloud storage service has a mobile app, the app likely has a built-in scanner. Use that. For example, the built-in Dropbox app works great. It turns your phone’s camera into a scanner, with auto focus, automatic edge detection, cropping tools, and everything else you’d want in a basic scanner.