It has been a number of years that I have been attempting to rid my world of paper. It started by just scanning ‘important’ documents to a folder on my home PC. I then progressed to getting as much correspondence to happen via e-mail and scanning everything else received on paper in the mail.

Making an across country move back in 2012 really made me step up the work and implement a ‘system’ for how I handled correspondence and how it was to be filed electronically. I also got a lot more aggressive with the shredder after a couple of years of hedging my bets and keeping originals.

Here are the 3 things that made a difference for me

1. Get someone else to do the work!
   I guess what I mean by this is that there are many opportunities to eliminate paper by seeking out opportunities to have regular correspondence and bills e-mailed instead of posted. The less items you have to physically scan then the more reliable your system becomes. This is also invaluable when travelling for work a lot.
   The more automated it can be… the better! When I first started using Google Apps for e-mail I used a a lot of filters to trap certain e-mails and file accordingly.
   The ability to further automate is even easier now with tools like IFTTT. If you are going to do a task more than once…then automate it if you can!
2. Duplex / multi-feed scanning is king!
   When it comes to making things quick and easy….then duplex scanning is a must! The time taken messing around with multipage documents disappears when you have a scanner where you can feed multiple pages in and capture both sides automatically. These type of documents accounted for about 70% of what I was needing to scan, so I spent a lot of time in the early days wrestling with the old flatbed scanner on my MFD.
   If you don’t have a requirement for duplex and/or multi-feed then make sure you get the best scanner for what you need to do. I now use a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i. The other key things to look for in a scanner will be if you can automate how it handles scans and can it store direct to a specified folder or even better link direct to a cloud based service.
3. Searching is superior to any filing or tagging system!
   When I progressed to Google Apps for storing scanned documents, in what is now Google Drive, I thought I had the best system possible. I could easily search by filename and later when it became available the search could even recognise text within the scanned document or uploaded pdf file. I found that I could stop trying to remember fancy naming conventions and what folders I scanned and saved files into as I learnt to trust that I could just search for what I needed.
   I have recently (Nov 2013) moved to using Evernote (EN) for storing almost my entire digital world. One of the primary reasons was one button scanning from the Fujitsu scanner direct to EN. The other key reason was the search capabilities and how intuitive it was to find things. That is also why the most recent update to EN in the past week is so exciting. They are calling it “Descriptive Search” and it is about making searching even easier.

At this point I should also declare that the reason I have become so confident with EN in such a short time is largely due to the wisdom of one of Evernote’s  Ambassadors for paperless living – Jamie Todd Rubin. There is a wealth of information available for anyone considering going paperless or wanting to get more done with EN. View Jamie’s blog about “Going Paperless” for a heap of tips & tricks.