I noticed an interesting post in my Google+ feed today being promoted by Google Drive. It is a campaign that is pushing people to go paperless in 2013.
I have personally been about 90% paperless since roughly 2008. For me, I was kind of forced into it. I would get calls from clients out of the blue asking me questions about discussions from meetings that may have occurred weeks ago. All my notes sat in a stack on my desk. Try finding something specific while on the phone with a client from a stack of papers on your desk. It just got to be to hard. So I said to myself that it would sure be a lot easier if I could simple search for the information like searching for a website in Google. This got me moving things into a digital format.
I still tweak the process and wide variety of applications and services exist today that really help in this endeavor making it easier to go paperless than ever before.
Some paperless pitfalls still exist. First you will have the die hard people that must have paper, you know the kind, they print out every email so they don’t lose it and then ask you to send it to them again when they can’t find it. You will run across companies that are stuck in 1980 and then there are the endless receipts and don’t get me started on the government.
This year my wife and I have been discussing investing in a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 to deal with the inevitable paper that we still get.
With the mobile revolution underway it is time to eliminate the paper to make mobile even more useful. Give it a try in 2013.