Some percentage of my bills, invoices, receipts and other notes are in paper form, and the rest are electronic. At the moment as I see it you’ve got two choices:
1. You print everything and file it.
2. You scan everything and store it.
Well, in years gone by with the ratio of printed material to electronic material, the former would have made more sense, but now with the price of scanners becoming more reasonable, I’m going to proudly join the ever-growing masses of people choosing to digitize their paper documents.
Given that most people spend a significant amount of time using computers at work and home, this change makes sense. Why organize all of your important files offline, when you receive most of them electronically? Why waste paper and space by printing out your electronic documents, unless it’s really required?
If you are looking to “rip†your paper documents, to join your existing electronic documents, then a good place to start would be reading these two articles: What’s on Jason’s Hard Drive and 10 File Management Tips. The first article discusses how to scan, organize and backup documents and the second article focuses on how to organize electronic documents.
Digitizing and organizing all of your paper documents (as PDF files, of course!) might be a bit of work at first, but in the long run, it’ll pay off.
