Digitize your life; travel more – dealing with paper

Recently I realized that since my plan when I retire is to travel more, I really should start getting rid of the clutter in my home.  In the past year or so, I’ve easily gotten rid of approximately 2 filing cabinets full of paper/photos/books, etc. The total volume is probably that of a full single closet.  But I still have access to nearly all the information. Going nearly paper-free can be relatively simple.

HOW?

How do you get rid of so much paper quickly?

In my case, the best option I found was a really easy to use scanner, that also happens to be pretty affordable.  After much research, I got this one on and it’s really been great.  You can put well over a dozen pages into it and it scans both sides and uses text recognition on it so you can search for words in it in the resulting PDFs. You can continue adding paper as the feed stack gets low, too. It scans in both black and white and color, and single or double-sided.  Double-sided scanning is a real time-saver – especially since it has the option to delete any blank pages. It’s also small enough I can take it on trips if I want if I think I’ll have a lot of paper I don’t want to take home.

Once you have a scanner you like, then you can start digitizing. What paper items in your home can you digitize?

Tax and financial records

Have old tax records?  Just feed the whole file into the scanner and save it to your hard drive (then shred or otherwise destroy the originals).  There goes one file cabinet drawer from my life 🙂  Always, always use a backup system like SpiderOak or Dropbox to save this info in case something happens to your computer.

Pro-tip: now you can find anything just searching for words. So if I want to know what I paid in real estate taxes in 2013, I can just keyword search for those terms.

Manuals and other documentation

I scanned (or downloaded if they were available) the manuals I had been keeping for products I’ve bought.  And now when I get a new product, I do the same, so all my manuals are in one folder on my hard-drive (and in the cloud) so that I can find them easily simply by searching for the product name. You can also scan the receipt into the same file so any warranty claims are easier.

When I need to find a manual now, I can just search my manual folder for “toaster” or “printer” and get exactly what I need. And within the documents, I can search for “paper jam” or “burnt” to get to the information I need.

Memorabilia

In the past when I traveled, I’d kept tickets and other mementos and handouts from places I’d been.  The vast majority of them went through the scanner and were thrown out.  So now if I want to remember where I went in England, rather than digging through a box of stuff from all over Europe, I can go to my England folder in the cloud and see what things I went to, and any notes I took while there.

I also scanned things I’d kept from college and high school.  That note a friend gave me.  The notes from class that were covered with written conversations I had with the people next to me. That college report which a friend had added a paragraph about how I shouldn’t leave my computer unattended because people could edit my documents – and I hadn’t noticed it before handing it in (but the professor did).   I scanned the signed front and end-papers from yearbooks.  I even scanned some drawings from when I was a kid. And off to the trash the vast majority went.  I kept some, but it’s now just a packet rather than about half a drawer of random things.

Books

I also went through my books and have started looking out for which ones are on Kindle and looking for deals on them.  As I replace them in Kindle versions I get rid of the paper ones.  And over a few months buying books for a couple of bucks and sometimes even free, hundreds of books went to Goodwill and local little libraries.  Win-win. And out of my life, without any loss of entertainment value.

Results

Everything I want to know is so much easier to find now.  And I now have the filing cabinet full of craft supplies instead of manuals, tax documents and other paper.

Happy travels!