A System Approach to Going Paperless

We live in an information packed world which is growing by leaps and bounds everyday. With all that information it is easy to get overwhelmed and get your space cluttered especially if you are trying to manage stacks of paper.

One way to reduce your paper overload is to use some digital tools to not only reduce the clutter and space for old filing cabinets but also to make your information instantly retrievable.

A system that works for me consists of the following tools:

Scansnap Scanner

I really love my scansnap scanner because it is compact on my desk and it can quickly scan paper in colour or black and white on one or both sides. Most of all it is quick and easy and can be setup to automatically use a scanning software workflow. The scansnap is designed for paper feed so if you have other items like books you may want to also invest in a flat bed scanner.

PDFpen OCR

My preferred format for digital documents is PDF and PDFpen is a specialized tool for doing all things PDF including Optical Character Recognition (OCR). There are various types of PDF documents but the most useful kind are those where the scanned image has its text portions converted to digital text because it can then be found when searching for keywords. PDFpen has lots of features for pretty much doing whatever you want with PDF documents including things such as editing, annotating, signing, appending, merging, etc.

Devonthink Pro Office

As useful as PDFpen is for working with PDF documents, in my workflow I actually use Devonthink Pro database to OCR and capture PDF documents first because in one step I can organize my document in a database. I can still use PDFpen later if I want to make changes to the document. In addition to the regular database functions Devonthink also has some Artificial Intelligence to find associations between documents that you might not recognize when manually filing. This helps you to become even more organized and do more with your information.

Spotlight Searching

The Mac operating system includes a search capability that can find keywords not only in the file names or keyword fields but also anywhere in the text. This is extremely useful as people have found when doing Google searches on the Internet. You don’t have to rely on remembering which file folder you saved the file to and you can find files in several ways such as topic, date, and filetype. There is also a show in finder option to quickly access the desired file. This works for all files and for those that were saved in Devonthink that database has additional searching capabilities.

Dropbox File Syncing

With file sharing services like Dropbox you are not limited to accessing documents on your main computer. You can also access them from your iPad tablet and iPhone. There is also a feature for quickly sharing files with friends or clients. Dropbox is a free service that adds a folder that syncs between all your devices. You save files from any device into the Dropbox folder and you can then access them from any of your devices. Once you have this capability you will never want to go back to trying to remember what computer you saved a file to. If you decide to use Dropbox do yourself and I a favour and use this Dropbox affiliate link. It is a Win-Win where you and I both get an extra 250MB of storage space for helping to spread the word about this excellent free service. There are options to pay for additional storage as well if you need it.

In this article I have focussed on my Mac and IOS based system for going digital to organize your information better. It is also possible to implement a paperless system using Windows or Linux but perhaps not so elegantly.