My office is far from spacious and as such the paper mountain is just simply not an option. Despite most of the world going digital, so much of our lives is still paper based.
Until companies, governments and our employers get with the programme we still have to battle against the accumulation of dead trees.
This is where technology can really play its part in simplifying your life and streamlining how you handle your paper work.
The first thing you should think about is investing in a really powerful scanner. Not the kind for scanning photos but the kind that can scan quickly and two sides at the same time. The Fuji Scan Snap range of scanners are pretty flawless.
The Scan Snap ix1300 is the latest from Fuji and packs many brilliant features but the most interesting is the ability to scan straight to you ios devices.
It is certainly not cheap but its super speed double side scanning and the fact it handles all different sizes of paper at once means you can fill it with invoices, bills, business cards and receipts and in a couple of seconds the whole lot is digitised.
There are lots of services and software out there for the storage of your docs. Here are some links to some that you might find useful.
Evernote – The ever useful and ever free evernote is superb for scanning to and is often integrated into the scanners software.[/one_half_last]
Paperless – I use this software as its very similar to the Finder you have on your mac and it has basic OCR (optical character recognition what this means, in a teeny tiny nutshell, is that the documents you scan are converted into searchable pdfs, saving time in tagging and naming files as all the text is searchable.
Yep – This little gem is great for those of you that like to use tags to organise your world. You can download a demo from their website.
One of the other elements of my near paperless life is the ability to make reasonable scans with my iPhone. I only have an iPhone 4 and yet the camera is more than suitable enough to scan documents. There is an app that makes things very simple and that is Genius Scan.
There are hundreds of scanning apps for iPhones and I have tried many of them and this one is heads and shoulders above the rest.
The main trick for me is its ability to auto crop and size your snaps as well as converting to High Contrast black and white which means that those wrinkled up thermal printed receipts that are normally so difficult to capture are made super clear and easy to read.
Genius Scan – An iPhone app I simply can’t be without it scans and crops documents with ease!
What do you use? do you have any gems to share? If so please leave a comment below 🙂
