Our version of the paperless office.

Image courtesy of loca.mama

In our efforts to reduce clutter in our home we are in the process of digitizing everything we can get our hands on.  We first tackled our bills. In the past when we received a bill that we had to pay, we would pay it online, mark the bill as paid and then file it away.  It is rare that we would have to pull that paid bill from the filing cabinet to check something.  If we did we would have to wander up to the office, dig through the file folders to find the correct company, then the correct bill to find the information we needed.  Under the new system, a bill comes in and sits in the physical “inbox” until we pay it.  Upon being paid online we then scan the bill and file it under a bills 2008 folder, a subfolder for the correct company and filename of “company-bill date”, for example, “bell mobility 8-May-08.pdf”.  Now if we need to access this information we don’t even have to get up from the desk or can do it from a laptop in the living room or wherever.

The second thing we attacked was our massive pile of take out menus.  Instead of the clump of take out menus under a pushpin on a bulletin board in our office they exist in a folder on our computer.  The third thing we tackled was our daughter’s ever increasing pile of artwork and such that she creates on a daily basis either here at home or at daycare.  Now we don’t toss everything, we keep the best of the best for a scrapbook.  The others get hung on the refrigerator and photographed.  We now have a photograph of every item of artwork she has created saved in a folder on our computer as a .jpg file that we can look through when we want to and got rid of the daunting pile of colourings and popsicle stick on cardboard crafts. We are slowly taking it further by scanning instruction manuals and pretty much everything we can get our hands on.  In the near future I see a high speed scanner in our future but at present our trusty HP is doing fine.

Now it must be said that this is not solely my own idea.  There is a large movement out there towards a paperless office.  I picked up the idea a while ago on 43 folders.  It starts out slow and develops into a sickness.  I want to digitize everything, store it an encrypted folder on our computer and reduce clutter.  How do you guys reduce paper clutter?  Leave your ideas in the comments.

Regards,
Zen Dad