I can think of lots of things I wouldn’t mind being “buried” in; dark chocolate bars and cashmere sweaters come to mind. But, paper is nowhere on that list. Paper can be confusing and overwhelming, so it often gets stacked, stashed or shoved- and ultimately never looked at again. Watch this video, grab yourself a chocolate bar and let’s cremate that stack of paper!
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdpaper-free.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today I’ve saved up a few things to show you how I am virtually paper-free using Evernote. Now, I like Evernote because it’s easy and it’s on all my different platforms – Android, and Ipad, and my regular computer – but you can easily take the same concept and use it just with saving picture files in Dropbox, or whatever you have, you can just do this, same idea, and have whatever system it is, and just be deliberate about it. But you can get rid of a lot of the paper in your life. So here are some things that have come up recently that I thought you might be interested in.
I have this new kitchen gadget that I like, and it has instructions on the side of the box. And in the old days I would have cut this panel out of the box and filed that away in my warranty files, and I would have probably not ever referenced that again for one thing. But what I will do now is take a picture of that in Evernote and recycle the box and then I won’t have any of that, and then the information will be at my fingertips. I can search it. When you take a picture in Evernote, all of the text inside the picture is searchable. So think about that for a minute. If I look up the word “butter” it’s going to find that inside the picture that I take. So that’s a very powerful search method that is a little bit harder to duplicate on your own with just a regular photograph in Dropbox. So that’s why I like Evernote.
Anyway, I got rid of this paper. Then this came up recently. I know this may have happened to you, you may have been at an auto rental counter and they’re offering you all of the extra insurance and you’re going, “Oh, man, I know one of the credit cards that I have includes auto rental insurance coverage, but I don’t know if it’s this credit card, or if I really have that coverage or not, and I don’t know what to do.” So I didn’t want that to happen to me. So I got this new card and I got the benefits brochure and I thought, “You know, I’m just gonna take about five minutes and go through this thing so that I know what benefits come with this card.” I travel a lot, so this is very helpful. I do indeed have the auto rental collision damage waiver coverage. I have lost luggage coverage. And I have roadside assistance, and all kinds of cool things. I will forget that later. So I went through and highlighted the pages that have the relevant information and then I took pictures of all of these pages and put them in Evernote. That way, this information is assessable to me at the car rental counter where I need it. Otherwise, this would be in a file in my office and I would never be able to look it up. So that’s part of the power of being virtually paper-free.
So I use this for lots of other things. I’ve done a video before where I talked about how I have a whole notebook in Evernote for my house. So I’ve got paint colors, tile samples, pictures of my rugs, measurements of my furniture, with pictures. I also have a whole notebook – and I did another video on this – for my recipes, for food, and that’s a whole other giant category that you can work with. And then I do other random things. This is my garage door opener manual, and I just took a picture of the page where it talks about how to program it when the batteries run out. So I don’t have to go find that again sometime.
There are all kinds of ways to get rid of that paper and keep it with you at your fingertips. I have a giant tutorial video on how to use Evernote that comes free with the purchase of my Home Office Handbook that is available on Amazon or on our website. And you can get that in an electronic format if you like, to be virtually paper-free, or we do have it in a printed book form as well. So check that out at https://www.clutterdiet.com/homeoffice.
We’ll see you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for how to go paperless or getting rid of paper.
Leave a Reply