I've been away for a while, on a long trip abroad. Having returned and finding a lot of free time on my hands I got into the once-in-a-decade "lets organize all my stuff" mood. In the process, I was stumbling onto piles of papers from everywhere I looked - bills and receipts, old paychecks and lecture summaries, diplomas and brochures... So, after throwing away mountains of useless old documents, I've decided to take the next step to avoid this problem in the future.
First - I scanned the remaining important documents and saved them as PDF files. So now I have some 150 scanned docs nicely organized on my computer, and I can go over them quickly and find what I need without rummaging through the papers themselves, which are neatly stacked in some faraway corner. And of course, I have all my important files backed up online - don't we all?
The second step was to stop getting all those papers in the first place. So I visited the websites of those companies who were filling my mailbox, such as the bank and credit card company, and changed the settings to receive all reports and bills online. Gladly, they all offered such an option, as this is clearly a saving for them as well.
Interestingly, soon you might not even have to keep the original documents stacked somewhere, as this proposal by the Justice Department (in Hebrew) will declare copies and scans of documents just as legally valid.
Very nice job!
ReplyDeleteJust that it takes a lot of time and patience (to go through the first initial step of the process).
By the way, in addition to all the advantages you mentioned, there's also the environmental aspect, of course. So the result is good for everyone.
Finding all the important papers took some time, scanning them into PDFs was fast enough. Knowing you, only the second part is what you need to do, and it's not that hard.
ReplyDeleteWhat I was thinking about doing, but would take a LOT of time is scanning my lecture summaries, as at the moment they are just a big stack of papers in a storage room.