In Part 1 I talked about Evernote being the first step to a paperless home. I still use Evernote every day and I’ve converted my husband too. After a few months now it’s beginning to feel like second nature to us. When we need to find something we automatically head to Evernote and search for it. It’s powerful search engine hasn’t let us down yet.
I will admit I haven’t kept up on the paper trail as faithfully as I anticipated. In the interest of being real – I snapped an unedited picture of what my paper pile looks like. Ignore the chocolate bar. I have no idea how it go there. It’s empty anyway.
That’s probably a weeks worth of mail and odd papers that have found their way into the house. I will sort through them and throw away the garbage. Obviously. Then I will scan anything I need to file and either throw it away, shred it or file it if it is a coupon. I love, love, love the efficiency of the work flow. Being able to only touch a piece of paper once is thrilling. At least for me. I know. I’m weird.
But, seriously, I love that I’m not going to be reshuffling those same papers around and around for the next couple of decades. It’s so rewarding to finish scanning and have the pile go from dwindle down to nothing!
Once everything is scanned, I will grab a few minutes here and there to tag them and categorize them in Evernote. I prefer to have everything sent to my inbox in Evernote and then organize it from there.
The other source of information coming into the house is my email inbox. It has been a challenge to keep it at zero – as I find I’m tending to leave important things there until I do them. I think I need to unsubscribe to all the junk email I’m getting each day too. Yesterday I got 163 emails – I can’t imagine I need 163 emails in a day!
But, even with my not-so-perfect work flow, this system is light years ahead of the old papers stuffed in a filing cabinet system. Have you tried going paperless? Share your tips in the comment section.
UPDATE: I sat down this morning and scanned the pile of papers and got my inbox to zero. Total time: one hour. Not bad!
I’m actually getting back to analog note taking with bullet journaling. You can check it on in my take on day 14: http://finkelsteinandsons.com/2015/04/24/introduction-to-bullet-journaling/
Just checked it out. Thanks for sharing!
Thank your for stopping by on my blog! If your interested, I wrote another on connecting written note taking with Evernote.
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