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How To Go Paperless And Become An Efficiency Monster
Modern consumer technology has made it possible for us to pare down much of what we own.
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Why buy DVDs when we can stream on demand?
Why buy CDs when Spotify almost certainly has what we're looking for?
Paper, however, poses an interesting problem in this sense. Whether it's receipts, birth certificates, or instruction manuals, we feel a need to hang on to this stuff.
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So how do you bring an analog medium into a digital world?
It turns out that it's much easier than you think, and doing so will likely make you way more efficient than you were before.
Leave the notebook at home. If you've got an iPad and a finger, you're already set up to take handwritten notes and scribble away inside a digital notebook of your own by using an app called Paper. The free app offers a simple pen tool with many more available as in-app purchases.
Price: free
Matt Cutts is head of Google's web spam team and wrote a blog post detailing how he got rid of his postal junk mail. He describes several different services you can register with that will help you in your fight on unwanted mail, but we're most intrigued by Green Dimes and ProQuo.
Green Dimes offers a free service and a more comprehensive paid service in which it will go through the required processes to unsubscribe you from various mailings.
ProQuo is an entirely free service that, as Cutts explains, "lets you stop many services with just a couple mouse clicks per service, but for about 50% of the marketers (maybe 10-15 of them) you have to print and send a letter or leave to an external website to complete a form. It’s still better than nothing though."
Evernote is so much more than a free mobile and desktop app. It borders on religion for some people, even here at Business Insider.
Not only does it let you save text and photo notes that sync across devices, but it even lets you turn text in an image into searchable digital text using optical character recognition.
Instead of filing paper away in a folder somewhere, just scan it and turn it into a PDF that you can keep on your computer (or on an online cloud backup). You don't want to have to deal with a mess of tree matter on your desk when you can manage digital data so much more easily.
E-books are pretty much released simultaneously (or even before) their physical counterparts. And you can carry an entire library of e-books in one hand without breaking a sweat. I'm a recent e-book convert and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Most magazines and comic books have their digital counterparts just as books do, and often times the tablet content is included in the regular subscription price. Do a little research – it'll vary from publication to publication, but odds are good that you can scoop up a digital subscription with minimal effort.
There's no easy way to save paper receipts. So store them with OneReceipt and throw them away. This app will keep digital copies of your receipts on hand so you never have to dig around to find an especially elusive record of purchase.
Price: free
People don't write letters anymore, they send emails. Why not invite people to your parties the same way?
For a paid (but very elegant) solution, we like Paperless Post.
For a free solution, check out Evite.com.
Throw away the calendar on your fridge and use Fantastical instead.
This full-featured calendar app keeps all of your appointments in your pocket without any issue at all. We took a close-up look at Fantastical last year and loved what we saw.
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