We all get bills, insurance policy descriptions, credit card statements – all kinds of documentation that we should maintain in an organized fashion. How many of us actually do this, though? Let’s face it – dealing with paper sucks. It takes up space, it kills trees, and it gives you cuts. It’s a 19th century medium in a 21st century world. Considerations like these led me to go paperless. I can say unequivocally that I will never go back.
The concept is simple. Instead of storing all of that information the old fashioned way, maintain it digitally on a computer hard drive. The benefits are numerous:
- Efficiency. Storing data digitally removes the need to maintain documents, of which you will probably accumulate quite a pile of during your lifetime. Scrap the filing cabinets and go for a hard drive instead. For the cost of a single cheap file cabinet, you can get a one terabyte hard drive, which will store far more than a filing cabinet can in something like one thousandth of the space.
- Redundancy. This one’s more important than you’d think. You’re asking, “What am I going to do with two copies of all of this stuff?” Well, have you considered what would happen if your home burnt to the ground? What would you do if you lost all of your documents? Redundancy can help you avoid ever running into this problem and probably net you a few extra minutes of sleep at the same time. With paper, redundancy is something from a Stephen King novel. Can you imagine making copies of all your documents and lugging them to some place other than your home? But if you go paperless, it’s much easier! All it takes is two DVD-RW discs, an external hard drive, or some space on a server.
- Security. You’re probably thinking I’m crazy right now. There’s no way you should ever leave a disc with all of that information on it just laying around somewhere outside your home, right? What if someone found it? Well, fortunately the digital world has you covered here too – with encryption. Just use a free program like TrueCrypt to encrypt your data locally on your hard drive. That way when you burn it to a disc, the encryption automatically goes with it. This is really just a bonus. After all, can you encrypt your paper documents?
- Flexibility. A piece of paper is a physical thing. It is an entity in its own right. Even if we’re only interested in the information on the paper, which we can think of as distinct and abstract, it’s impossible to store the piece of paper in more than one place at one time unless we create a duplicate, thus wasting resources. Obviously this is much easier to do in a paperless world. Just copy a file, or better yet, link against it to save hard disk space.
- Portability. With all of your documents on a disc, you can keep them with you wherever you go. Try that with your filing cabinets!
- Scalability. One trend in the digital storage world is very clear: Information density keeps going up. This means that even if you eventually run out of space on your terabyte hard drive, much larger drives will inevitably be available. Grab one, copy the information from your old hard disk over, and your ready to add more information without physically expanding the medium on which it’s stored. Or, stick with paper, and build a shed to house your new filing cabinet.
- Economy. Going paperless will save you money in the long run. End of story.
- Environmentally Friendly. We should all do our part to help keep the world green.
And those are just some of the more important benefits. Obviously it pays to be sensible when going paperless. I don’t advise scanning the deed to your home and scrapping the original. Having an electronic copy can’t hurt, though. Just use a bit of common sense.
What scanner and software are you using? I really was thinking about going paperless when I read http://www.43folders.com/2007/11/06/palimpsest-guide-mostly-paperless-life last year, but I decided to wait to make sure that it was really worth it. Considering that I hadn’t put too much thought into it since then, maybe that was the right move.
The only papers that I’m worried about maintaining are financial documents and assorted official documentation. Fortunately, more and more of those are already becoming electronic. I can already get my tax returns downloaded as pdfs, my monthly statements are emailed, and online banking gets rid of the need to keep receipts (mostly).
All the things that I feel better keeping — insurance forms, my birth certificate, job documentation, receipts for large purchases, etc — is small enough to keep in my fire-safe and and a small plastic bin. Once a year when that bin is getting full I can go through and trash the stuff I don’t need and dump the rest of it into a larger bin that I have in external storage.
That might not scale forever, but it is simple enough for now.
I just use an HP OfficeJet J3680 All-in-One printer/scanner with the HP provided software. It has a form feed scanner rather than a flatbed, which is a must if you scan a lot of documents. For the price point of less than $80, it does a fair job. I use a 200dpi resolution, which seems to keep the scans readily legible without ballooning their size too much. After all, the scans are images, and that means they are already substantially larger than standard text documents.
I’m surprised that you throw things away. I don’t, so if I were to continue going paperless I would surely exceed available storage space in a couple years. Keeping all of that stuff out of my closet and on a hard drive is well worth it for me. Plus, the advantages I talked about in the post are sufficiently persuasive to convince me of the superiority of paperless.