I’ve been virtually paperless for almost 15 years, and the trick for me was to think about it the same way I think about taking care of my teeth.
Staying organized is a kind of hygiene. It is almost never a one-time cleaning job. So think about dental hygiene. We learn 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 don’t follow that schedule precisely, you can still have good dental hygiene. you just have to do enough. If you do almost everything you’re supposed to do, but skip two days of flossing or are a few months late in scheduling your next cleaning, your teeth won’t suddenly fall out.
With hygiene (or any type of maintenance), you don’t have to be perfect; you just have to be good enough.
Going paperless is very similar to that. Here I want to share with you the plan I used to eliminate most of the paper from my life. It should help you get started, but know in advance that you don’t have to stick to it exactly every moment of every day. You can be wrong. You can forget. As long as you get into the habit most of time, you will find mostly No paper in a couple of months.
9 steps to stop using paper
Decide where to store the scanned documents. A natural option is to save them to a cloud storage service, such as Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. By saving them in the cloud, you will always have a backup copy. If you save files locally on your device, you could lose all of them if your device is destroyed, lost, or stolen.
Create an inbox. An inbox is nothing more than a folder where you will save newly scanned documents by default. If you are very organized, you may have specific folders where you want to organize each paper you scan. Brilliant. But where will your files go when you’re feeling lazy or out of time? By creating an inbox, you have a place where all your scanned files stay until you can sort them.
Choose a scanning app and don’t think too much about it. At this point, most scanning apps are perfectly suited for digitizing paper. (Scanning photos is another story and requires a specialized app or scanner.) If your cloud storage service has a mobile app, chances are the app has a built-in scanner. Use that. For example, the one included in the Dropbox app works very well. Turn your phone’s camera into a scanner, with autofocus, auto edge detection, cropping tools, and everything you want in a basic scanner.