My family and I have just moved to a new house and I’d like it to be nearly paperless. We all know the reasons to aspire to such a goal: In addition to being better for the environment in countless ways, being paper-free saves time and money.
Lateral file cabinets from Heartwork featured in A Labor of Love: Heartwork Office Furniture.
Which scraps of paper do you really need to hold on to? Toss whatever isn’t essential into the recycling bin as soon as it comes into your possession—and weed it out of your old filing cabinet, too.
1. Recycle, recycle, and recycle some more.
Sign up for electronic statement delivery or e-billing for all of your accounts, and use a service like Shoeboxed to manage your receipts.
2. Manage all of your bills online.
A vision of the pre-Cloud desk.
3. Reduce paper mail and put a stop to junk mail.
Services like PaperKarma and Catalog Choice will help you get rid of all that unwanted junk mail.
4. Conduct as much of your business electronically as possible.
Replace paper forms with electronic ones. And DropBox and Google Docs, among others, allow you to save and share documents electronically.
Photograph by Matthew Williams for Remodelista.
A dual printer and scanner tucked away in Dagmar Daley’s Disappearing Home Office.
5. Invest in a scanner.
Some scanners, such as the ones from Neat and Doxie Mobile Scanners, are designed to make document archiving and management more streamlined.
Photographs splayed out on the desk from Totokaelo’s Fashion-Forward Office in Seattle.
Photograph by Michael A. Muller for Remodelista.
Sites like GoPhoto, Snapfish, and ScanMyPhotos will digitize your old photos for a fee.
6. Digitize those shoeboxes of old photos.
7. Digitize your wallet.
Sounds a bit scary but heavenly too. LifeLock is an identity theft protection service that will protect digital copies of all of your important cards (ID, credit cards, bank information), so that you can access them from anywhere.
What to do with old print material?
8. Always be thinking about additional ways to save paper.
Consider saving documents as PDFs instead of printing them on actual paper (a habit I personally have yet to break). And if you must print, use both sides of the paper.