Productivity Series: Paperless Filing System

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's talk about going paperless.

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So in this episode of my Productivity Series let's talk about going paperless. About ten years ago I decided to go paperless and try to have absolutely no paper coming into or going out of my office. Now it's almost impossible to achieve absolutely no paper. But I'm getting pretty close. 

The first thing I did was try to get rid of all the paper I already had. I had a whole filing cabinet filled up ten years worth of paperwork. Every bill, every receipt, every notice I got from a company that all went into a filing system and I kept it by year. So at the end of every year there would be a big box of paper with that year's date on it. To convert that to digital I bought a scanner that would allow me to put a lot of paper into it and it would just scan through all of it. It was a Fujitsu model that is no longer made. As a matter of fact, much to my disappointment, it was made incompatible with Macs several years ago. They refused to update the drivers past 32 bit. So while this is the current model that does that I'm hesitant to recommend that. After all this company kind of stranded all these printers and created a lot of waste by having these out dated printers sitting around. I still have mine in a To Recycle bin. Technically I can use it with some third party software or hook it up to an old Mac. But I got most of my use out of it during my first year that I had it scanning in all the old documents. So look for a scanner like this. The features that you want are the ability to put a stack, maybe 40 or 50 sheets of paper into it at a time. It would scan both sides and do that very quickly and automatically. So if one side of the piece of paper was blank it would include that in the pdf and it would just kind of be a process where you put a document or group of documents into it, you hit the button, and then after a minute you get a pdf on your Mac. I was able to scan thousands of pieces of paper and go through years worth of old paperwork very quickly and digitize them. As a digital file it takes up virtually no space and they are all there on my computer. I can access them really easily from just about anywhere. 

Now the way I arranged them was this. I tried to keep things very simple and not create a bunch of busy work for myself. I created a folder called Files. You could put that in your Documents folder. I put if down one level in a Business folder.  But the File folder has subfolders by year. Of course this is my demo account. My real account actually goes all the way back to 2000. Then in each year there are a bunch of documents in it. I would use the naming technique where I tried to start with a Julian date like 20210215 and then a bunch of words that describe what's in it. When choosing the words I would think of about what I want to search for. I'm looking for an old water bill I'm probably going to search for water. So make sure that name is in there. 

Now these folders filled up, at first, with about two to three hundred documents each which really isn't that much considering that in most cases I'm never going to need these documents again. In cases that I do looking through documents with names like this, if there are two or three hundred of them, is only going to take me a few seconds to locate what I want. Plus today's software is a little bit better than what they had ten years ago. Most of today's scanning software will actually recognize the words in there and add that to the pdf. So if you search for the content of the document even though they are scanned images, really, you should be able to come up with a result that bring up the words in the pdf. 

Now the second step was reducing the amount of paper coming into my office. So this as a matter of going through everybody that sent me things in the mail and seeing if they had anything paperless or online only options. In most cases i was able to find that. Simply by switching to online billing, for instance, for most services I was able to avoid actually getting any paper bills.  Other companies like health insurance usually have options for only getting documents by email. With some companies you can even email and they'll just have all the online documents that you need when you log into your account and you can download them as a pdf if you want but you're never going to be sent anything by mail unless you request it. So in the early 2000's I probably had a pretty large box of paper coming in every year. But by 2015 or so I was able to reduce that to just a few inches of paper per year. 

So now that that scanner no longer works for me I actually scan in two ways. One is I have a multi-function printer that actually allows you to feed documents into the top and scan them. So I can do kind of the same thing but it's not as convenient and it's only one-sided. But if somebody does send me ten pages of something I can have that scanned in. Otherwise if it's one or two pages I use my iPhone to scan. Just use the function in the Files App to Scan Document and create a pdf. Since this Files folder is in iCloud Drive I can do it directly from my iPhone right to a file here. 

Now I don't bother putting it into a folder right away. I usually have new documents just sitting outside of these folders and I let them accumulate for a little awhile and every once in a while I go in and I grab these and I'll drag them into the appropriate year. This way I could just scan or drag something into the Files folder which I keep here under Favorites and worry about putting it into the subfolder later on. 

The boxes are labeled by year and I could probably toss them or shred them right away but I've got room so I keep them around for the traditional seven years and then I have them shredded. Now the great thing about pdf's like this is that it can also add online receipts. So, for instance, if I pay a bill online and then there's the screen saying you could Print Your Receipt then I print but I Save as PDF and then add it here just like it was something I scanned. 

Now at the end of every year I bundled up all of the new files into a new box or actually it's getting small enough where I can just bundle them into a folder and I kind of review what I got. Sometimes I notice that there's one thing, one company that is sending me something every month. Then I'll look into how to have that reduced or eliminated. So it's important to kind of keep maintaining things and keep the number of pieces of paper coming in low. It looks like 2021 is definitely going to be a new all-time low for the number of pieces of paper that I had to scan and then put away in a folder. Hopefully I'll be able to get even closer to zero in years to come.

Of course it goes without saying that I also don't print anything. I just don't print. I can't even remember the last time I bought paper. It's important to not only stop paper from coming in but from creating any new paper myself. Any document I need to create or send to somebody I do it digitally. If I need to sign something I use the function in Preview where I can sign the digital document or use whatever online system the company wants for signing something digitally so I avoid having to print something, sign it, scan it back in. I just don't use any paper at all. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.