The Complete Guide to Going Paperless

Gina Tra­pani is fast becom­ing one of my favorite writ­ers. She has come up with some of the best, most prac­ti­cal posts in Life­hacker and I have reposted some of her posts sev­eral times in this blog. Here is another one of her tips.

You already pay your bills online and get elec­tronic state­ments, but there are even more ways you can stop killing inno­cent trees and wast­ing time and money deal­ing with paper. It’s time we went paperless.

Reduce Unnec­es­sary Postal Mail

Junk mail and cat­a­logs are two of the biggest sources of annoy­ing and unwanted paper. Instead of con­tact­ing every com­pany who sends you a cat­a­log or piece of mail and ask­ing to be removed from their mail­ing list, there are ser­vices who help you opt out en masse.

Credit card offers and direct mar­ket­ing mail

At Optout​pre​screen​.com, you can request to be per­ma­nently or tem­porar­ily removed from credit and insur­ance offer mail­ing lists. At DMA­choice you can reg­is­ter to opt out of direct mar­ket­ing mail you don’t want as well. The Fed­eral Trade Commission’s Con­sumer Alert also includes infor­ma­tion on how to stop receiv­ing unso­licited mail and tele­mar­keter calls.

Cat­a­logs
For a cheap $20 per year, the Mail­stop­per ser­vice (for­merly known as GreenDimes) will help you get off cat­a­log mail­ing lists and they’ll also plant five trees in your name. I haven’t used Mail­stop­per per­son­ally, but sev­eral of my friends have. In fact, Googler Matt Cutts blogged about how he reduces junk mail using Mail­stop­per and other ser­vices like CatalogChoice.

“Print” and Scan to PDF

Instead of print­ing doc­u­ments onto paper and fil­ing them away, “print” them to PDF files. Mac users already have a “Save as PDF” option built into every Print dia­log by default. Win­dows users need a lit­tle extra software.

I use the free CutePDF Writer, which adds a PDF “printer” to your options. Choose it and you’ll save the doc­u­ment to PDF (instead of print­ing it on paper). Adam likes doPDF, which serves the same purpose.

Most desk­top search soft­ware, like Google Desk­top or Mac OS X’s Spot­light can search inside the con­tents of PDF files, so you don’t need any extra soft­ware to find PDF’s you’ve saved. See also Life­hacker read­ers’ picks of best PDF readers.

If you’ve already got an impor­tant bit of paper­work in your hand but you want to dig­i­tize it, you need a good doc­u­ment scan­ner. I’m still lov­ing my Fujitsu ScanSnap, a portable doc­u­ment scan­ner that I bust out for con­tracts, legal agree­ments, and other already-in-paper-form documents.

A Word on Back­ing Up Your Data
Of course, once you start dig­i­tiz­ing impor­tant paper­work, you’ve got to have a good backup sys­tem in case your hard drive fails or com­puter crashes. While fires, flood, and cof­fee spills can just as eas­ily hap­pen to paper, com­puter dis­as­ters are always pos­si­ble. Be sure you’ve got auto­matic local and remote backup for your data just in case.

Dig­i­tize Your Sig­na­ture and Email Instead of Fax

The biggest source of paper in my work life is con­tracts and client agree­ments that need to be signed and returned. While peo­ple gen­er­ally say “sign this and fax it back to us,” you can do it with­out get­ting paper involved. First, cre­ate a dig­i­tal ver­sion of your sig­na­ture with a trans­par­ent back­ground. Then, get the doc­u­ments via email, and email (or eFax) them back with your sig­na­ture added to them. (While there are lots of dif­fer­ent kinds of elec­tronic and dig­i­tal sig­na­tures, this type will work for com­mon con­sumer sce­nar­ios. It won’t work if you need some­thing nota­rized or to appear with an orig­i­nal signature.)

Bypass Paper Entirely and Cap­ture Infor­ma­tion Electronically

Many of us walk around with mini-computers/digital cam­eras in our pock­ets thanks to smart­phones, and we can use them to bypass paper entirely. Instead of jot­ting your gro­cery shop­ping list on a scrap of paper, use Gmail Tasks, Remem­ber the Mlik or your list man­ager of choice on your phone. Tran­scribe white­boards to PDF or even fax doc­u­ments using previously-mentioned Qipit. Also, pop­u­lar note-taking appli­ca­tion Ever­note makes it dead easy to cap­ture ideas, lists, and notes with­out killing a sin­gle tree.

What Lit­tle Paper You HAVE to Keep

Get­ting rid of ALL the paper in your home or office still isn’t pos­si­ble in a world where receipts, birth cer­tifi­cates, house deeds, mar­riage cer­tifi­cates, and other impor­tant infor­ma­tion still needs to be in-hand. To keep your finan­cial paper­work vol­ume down to a min­i­mum, check out Get Rich Slowly’s guide to what money records you need to keep and for how long. Then, keep your fil­ing cabinet’s con­tents lean, mean, and organized.