I’ve always wanted to be mostly paper-free.
I mean *mostly* because if I want to address the elephant in the room, I do have a lot
of books, and I do keep purchasing them.
I’ve been transitioning, however, to a different routine where I tend to purchase audiobooks
when I want to learn more about things that I can mostly find in self-development books
and I will leave the fiction titles to their paper-format.
But there’s a lot of paper in my house besides books - I have documents, receipts, bills,
contracts, random notes, notebooks, letters and notepads which, after a bit of thought,
I found were all pretty much useless for my specific lifestyle, and, for a 500 square
foot apartment, were taking up valuable space that I could just use to organise other things
better.
I currently have almost an entire Kallax unit that is full of these scraps of paper and
I’ve promised myself that I would take care of this issue until I stopped working from
home so this is the video that shows you the whole process behind this little project.
So the first thing was actually taking everything out of that unit and piling each document
according to topic - car related stuff, contracts, old college notes, letters, etc.
After finishing making those piles, I got my phone, accessed my Family Documents folder,
which is a shared folder in iCloud, and created one folder per pile so I already know where
everything is supposed to go.
And because this was definitely not a single day event, I committed to organize one pile
of documents per day while keeping the remaining documents already organised and ready to be
filtered in the future.
Each pile of document would have to be sorted as well into smaller piles:
1.
**A pile for documents that should be immediately trashed;**
2.
**A pile for documents that should be scanned, then trashed;**
3.
**A pile for documents that should be scanned, then kept.**
And then it’s time for the scanning process, which is the time consuming thing that basically
justifies why I had to break this process into several days.
I used the free version of an app called CamScam for this because it’s simple and intuitive
enough for me and that’s pretty much the only reason.
It’s pretty good at automatically detecting the corners of your document and formatting
the image so it looks scanned.
You can then rearrange your image and add pages to your document and then upload it
directly to your preferred folder.
If you’ve watched my video on “10 tips to organize digital files” then you know
that I believe you should always use the same naming system for all of your digital files.
Every time you have a date sensitive file, type in the date of the file *first,* in a
year, month, day format because it’s easier for your computer to sort.
Follow that with the name of your file and then add in any kind of specification or version
sensitive data that is able to distinguish that file from other versions.
And that’s it.
Any kind of complicated organising system will just make looking for your files a living
nightmare.
Also, don’t add dates if your files are not date sensitive and keep everything as
short and simple as possible.
While I was scanning documents that had to be kept, I used a simple red dot on the right
upper corner of each scanned page to mark that that page was scanned and properly filed.
Then I tucked the document away in its folder again.
After I gathered the documents that were marked to be kept, I filed them as neatly as possible
in one folder only and just took that to the basement because it definitely doesn’t need
to be kept in the apartment.
Then all of a sudden I had a lot of space to use and organize other things that were
just laying around.
And that’s pretty much the whole process behind this small project.
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