Or mostly so. (I am referring to your personal life, not business)
How did you do it? How much extra time does it take?
Thanks.
My gf pays all her bills online. We each have Kindles. We do not get a newspaper. What all else is there?
Is this about buying a bidet?
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samclem, moderator
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by paperless in a personal context. For most businesses, the work involved in going paperless is that office procedures can be performed and tracked without generating a paper trail. Most people don’t take household procedures that way.
Maybe you’re just thinking about document storage?
I have gone mostly paperless both at the office and at home. It doesn’t take much extra time at all. In the home, the major difference from before is that I scan everything I would normally keep in a filing cabinet. This actually takes less time than filing it, I think, but you should budget 15-20 minutes a week for scanning docs and naming files. I do it at the same time I pay bills. You’ll still have most of your services sending you a bill, but there are ways that you can get electronic statements from many merchants.
The keys are to set up a procedure so you don’t forget anything, and have the disciplien to stay on top of it. No system will work if you put everything off to the end of the year and then scramble to sort, scan, download, etc. all at once. 5 minutes a day seems like a minimal time commitment; when you view it that way, but you’re actually looking at 30 hours a year if you put it all off to the end.
All my bills save one are via email, and of the catalog-type retailers I use, I have requested no paper mailed to my house so I get all the sales and specials via email from them, too. All my bill payments are online save the one bill per year which is my safe deposit box, for which I get a paper bill in the mail and have to write a check and mail it back. Weird.
So while there is an initial setup time, after that it’s pretty nearly zero time compared to paying bills by check and mail. It’s all automatic and all I have to do is log in to my bank and make sure the amounts are correct, I do this probably once a week when I’m checking my balance and checking my payroll deposits are correct.
What else… Taxes. I file electronically but still get paper W-2’s and 1099’s, so I print my returns and file them with the W-2’s and 1099’s. That’s the only thing I can think of other than receipts/warranties/contracts that I file paper copies of. I have a couple places that text my receipt rather than print one when I pay in person.
I think I’m about as paperless as I can get.
Non!
I took a message for my father yesterday. Other than that, I haven’t used a pen to made marks on paper for months, except the one recurring expense I have to pay by paper check.
I’m a writer. Even away from my computer I use Evernote on my phone.
We’re largely paperless at home. I spent quite a few hours last fall pulling out, organizing, scanning, and shredding lots of old bank statements etc. Things like current statements get downloaded from the financial institution.
We don’t have OCR software in use - well, we have it (came with the all-in-one printer) but haven’t made any effort to OCR the documents; they’re just scanned as PDFs.
We also want to get all our old photos scanned; need to send those off soon actually.
I find it amazingly liberating. I’ve got everything set up under our Dropbox folder, and have set up file folders for each institution/account, so I can quickly navigate to them (also having them on Dropbox means several automatic backups, in that it’s online as well as on 3 different computers).
There was a fair bit of time involved. I had to:
[ul]
[li]Figure out how to make the scanner work from the scanner button (involved tweaking the computer’s firewall settings)[/li][li]Get things unfolded and organized by single-sided vs. double-sided (our all-in-one can scan either sort)[/li][li]Organize things into “can bulk scan” like a whole year’s worth of statements, vs. “must scan individually”[/li][li]Put some things on the document glass (smaller receipts)[/li][li]Wait for the painfully-long double-sided scans to run (they took more than 3x as long as a similar size of single-sided stack)[/li][li]Review the scanned PDFs, rename/organize them, re-scan if needed (occasionally a batch would miss a page).[/li][li]Shred the documents afterward (we have a small home-use shredder that could only do x pages a day - and ultimately died under the abuse and had to be replaced). [/li][/ul]
You’ll sometimes run into places that will have free “bring 'em in and we’ll shred 'em” days, or shredding for a fee is always an option. Our credit union has free shredding days periodically and I suspect Kinko’s etc. may do it for a fee. I’d personally be weird about that because you’re handing boxfuls of presumably-sensitive stuff and not necessarily seeing it go directly into the shredder, but I may be paranoid.
Depending on the types of documents, OCRing them may be more of a hassle than it’s worth. I mean, if I need a stock statement from 2002, I can just look under that stock’s folder, find the file(s) with 2002 in the title, and I’ve got what I need. But for other documents that may be really useful - say, if you’re scanning magazine articles.
Largely. Most of my utility bills are paperless now. I’m a school governor and nearly all of the correspondence and documentation for that is now paperless (with the exception of documents printed for the express purpose of being signed and dated - not sure if we have to do that by statute, or if we just haven’t thought of a better way)
Oooh - as far as “extra time”: as noted, I invested a fair chunk of time in getting to this point, but now it’s a time saver. Plus I can do things wherever I’m at my laptop - home, couch… no need to chase my daughter away from the computer.
Bills are virtually all done online now. We receive a few in the mail, and I get annoyed when we have to pay 'em via snail mail! Though we do still write a surprising number of checks, that’s partly because we have kids and that can be the best way to pay for school stuff etc.
Slowly but surely, companies pressure me every month to switch to paperless.
My mortgage company just dropped a $7.50 a month fee on me for making an online payment by bank draft, which I’ve been doing that way for years. After calling and complaining the 2 options I have are automatic bank draft or paperless billing. I opted for the paperless billing. But before calling I had signed up for the automatic bank draft, which they told me would start in April. That doesn’t help me for the March payment! So that’s why I called them.
Now for the irony, they sent me a paper letter confirming they started me on automatic bank draft, and then another paper letter after I canceled it. And yet they are trying to save paper.
Well, the French are involved…
We’ve been paperless for years. We quite literally do not have any paper. I have some cards and a calligraphy pen. That’s it. I also have some coloured paper for arts and crafts, because I teach English to little children.
I can’t imagine what I would use paper for in everyday life… what do most people do with paper? I write shopping lists in white board marker on the tile of the kitchen, then take a picture on my phone. I can barely remember getting paper bank statements, and banks in the Netherlands are now moving to internet banking only.
We play pictionary on a nice frame with a blank background. I usually hang it in the loo and write a nice quote on it (currently: ‘I wonder what Piglet is doing’, thought Pooh. ‘I wish I were there to be doing it too.’)
What do most people use paper for?