Want to go paperless? Been there and I'm doing it. Here's a braindump on more or less how I have including even a little video to share a few of the tools I have used to get there.
Recently a buddy of mine, who has a very successful real estate business, was sharing with me just how badly he wants to go paperless with his business. Real estate people feel this pain like almost no other. Everything has a form. The only thing more paper intensive might be the medical field, or probably any governmental concern.
Since I am paperless (I don't even take notes on paper anymore, if I have my Macbook open and running, which is almost always), this discussion with my buddy got me listing out all my favorite applications, both online (websites) and the kind you'd load on your personal computer. He took some notes and I have yet to check back with him to see if he has made any progress in this arena.
Meanwhile, today I saw an ad for a company here in town that promotes giving you the ability to "be paperless" so I took a peek at their site. They are basically an online document storage company, which is all fine and good, but the ability to store documents is just a sliver of what's needed to truly avoid the use of paper at all times while one is working. We usually all have some form of collaboration, project management and intercommunication going with others, and that makes for a pretty dynamic existence. "Storage" is very static (little to no change). To become truly paperless requires more than just one e-tool as a result. I use many.
In other words, if paper is something you truly want to curb in your life, there's much more to consider than just storing it. You can do it, though, with less effort than you might think.
Here are some more thoughts I have had on this area.
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