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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Paperless Home Office

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It seems that our desk at home is always stacked with paper - art and craft projects from the kids, shopping receipts, bills, school newsletters, and more.

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In an attempt to curb the clutter and keep the desk (and counter, and table) clear, I've begun to go paperless. I do think it's almost impossible to go 100% paperless, as at times you need to keep original receipts, at the very least.

So how do you begin to go as paperless as possible? It's fairly simple and can be started in a few easy steps:

  • contact the companies who send you paper bills and request emailed bills instead.
  • create folders on your computer, just as you would files in a cabinet.
  • scan all of the papers you need to keep, that are acceptable as copies.
  • after scanning, shred the non-necessary personal pages to put into the recycle.
  • keep originals that you'll need for tax purposes.
As for the kid's craft and art projects, take photos of the projects so they can be recycled in due time.  Assemble to photos into an album so your kids can look at them whenever they'd like to do so. 

If you have any other pointers on going as paperless as possible, please let us know in the comments section, or on our facebook page.


1 comment:

  1. Awesome ideas that I need to implement as well, as I'm sure you noticed when you were here! LOL :D

    We backed everything up on an external portable hard drive, feeling quite smug and confident that we were covered that way. Until my laptop died and then the portable hard drive broke. We just squeaked 8 years of the kids pictures off it onto a new drive before it finally went belly up. Lesson here? Have a special external hard drive or USB key or two even if you are scanning receipts, paper etc and then store it somewhere safe and don't use it all the time, keep it just for important documents and pics etc.

    ~Laila :D

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