The Paperless Endeavor

by David Gluzman

What’s an office without a forest of paper trails? What’s a purchase without a receipt? What’s a visit to the washroom without.. well um.. Actually let’s not go that far. I’m going paperless.

Sure you can be a fancy pants and load up all your music onto your Ipod, but I’m sure you have a pen or a stack of paper in your pocket! (Cue Dockers Khakis commercial) I’m absolutely sick and tired of having paper all over the damned place. I can’t be rid of it, and I look around and I’m also surrounded by computers. One of them has to go.

Paper is wasteful.

Paper makes me angry.

I don’t like doing my taxes.

As some of you might know I run a few companies and by doing so I have to keep track of all my purchases, expenses, invoices etc. Here’s a little secret.. I don’t own a filling cabinet which ends up making things sorta messy. Then again a few years ago I stopped printing paper invoices and went with PDFs (Adobe Acrobat) email invoices. I only wish the rest of the world could reciprocate.

Last year I decided I wouldn’t hold onto any of my paper receipts and simply pay for everything with my Credit Cards. I would then track the all my expenses on the monthly credit card statements. This worked great and last year I submitted my taxes without having to ship a shoebox of invoices to my accountant. I compiled one simple spreadsheet with a summary of all my figures. If big brother wants to come check me out so be it, everything is remarked digitally including what, where, when and and how much. Bam.

You can already get most of your bills sent to you over the internet versus getting the bills in the physical mailbox anymore. This is fine, but for those stubborn places that simply insist on sending you paper I plan on dusting off my scanner (which has been getting less and less use since the invent of digital cameras). I plan on putting anything and everything scanned into monthly folders on my computer then shredding the paper evidence and be done with it FOREVER!

Business cards, note taking or any other form of pocket sized paper will now reside on my newly passed down PDA (thanks Andrew). Now that I look around here at my computer I can see a few hundred business cards.. Hmm.. I gotta get on that.

So here are the tools I plan on using to go paperless in 2004:

• 1 Full Document Scanner
• 1 Fully Functional Computer
• 1 Adobe Acrobat (www.adobe.com)
• 1 PDA
• 1 Industrial strength Paper Shredder (cause you know junkmail is thicker these days)

So the only downside I can see to going paperless is instead of having boatloads of paper stacks all over the place, I’m going to have stacks of CD’s as backups all over the place. Mind you I’d rather shift thru CD’s than my next bonfire kindling. The only thing slowing me down after that is the rest of you people holding up the show! Keep your ratty trees to yourself please and thank you.

David Gluzman