Many of the ideas on Pinterest to organize paperwork would not look terribly out of place 100 years ago.
Pinterest often seems dedicated to buying stuff and filling space. This makes me anxious: I’ve come to appreciate the calmness of empty space, absence of stuff, ma, the space between.
This is how we organize paper:
- Place any documents that should be retained on a shelf.
- Periodically, find PDFs of the documents that might exist online; scan the remaining documents.
- Once we have digital versions of all the documents, drop them in the recycling bin, possibly via a shredder.
The shelf, above, temporarily holds documents that need to be digitized.
Alternatively, a small scanner makes it easy to scan short documents immediately after receiving them.
Incidentally, we’ve had great luck with the Brother brand. We bought the Brother all-in one laser printer and scanner with automatic document feeder in 2015. We bought the small Brother desktop scanner in 2011. A descendant of the all-in-one printer was on sale last week for $120.
Sometimes I use my smartphone as a scanner. The Google Drive app has a scan function that makes it easy to scan multiple pages and create a PDF file.
Today we have two paper scanners, but no filing cabinets, and store almost no paper. Of course, we only have digital documentation for the scanners.
There are so many payoffs for eliminating paper. For example, when we sold our house a couple years ago, I dragged PDFs for all our appliances and HVAC systems to a folder. On closing day, the buyers were given a link to the folder.
Example: Eliminating all Paper Product Documentation
Product manuals are a waste of paper.
Earlier this year, when we moved into our condo, we found ourselves staring at a pile of documentation for the appliances. I put the pile on the shelf, to be digitized at a later date.
A couple weeks ago I replaced the documents with electronic versions then tipped the paper into the recycling bin.
Simple Google searches usually brought me to PDF versions of the documents which I then downloaded.
Product documents often have their own part number. The above Google search brought me to the exact electronic version (49-80822) of the manual for our GE oven.
Occasionally, I had to scan paper.
The end result speaks for itself.
