ooooo.  If you find a good small scanner let us know!  This is exactly what I want to do.  

I won’t go on a rant here about this but all this paperless talk makes me very sad…

I am a firm supporter of using snail mail. I fear too many people are switching away from this and our now daily delivery system will soon be just another thing of the past. I heart my post office.  

I have also read some real facts on how ‘environmentally friendly’ it actually is to go paperless. I urge anyone interested to do some research. The footprint of all of these printers/scanners/fax machines just to be made let alone the energy consumption of the massive servers that store all this information, even just to operate the home computer far outweigh the footprint of newspapers, bank statements, or books. Just saying, please (PLEASE!!!) look into it a little before switching. Green isn’t always what it seems.

I am *nearly* paperless…unless you count that huge-ass stack of papers/photos in my closet in “queue” to be scanned, hah!

That scanner….awesome.

I, too, have one of those big bulky all-in-one deals and scanning is such a slooooow process (thus the stack of stuff to be scanned!). I’m almost done with decluttering though, then it’s on to that stack…ugh

Anyway – you inspired me to toss EVERYTHING in my big square file, minus the truly important things! Thanks

Desiree @ http://mnmlmom.blogspot.com/

I don’t own a printer.  It’s too tempting to print out things that you don’t really need.

What things can we absolutely not throw away even after keeping in digital form.  Birth certificate of course, but what else?

I went completely paperless last winter. Using an online storage program called, Dropbox, I was able to digitize everything. I got rid of my printer, use the iPad camera with an app called JotNot as a scanner and shred every piece of paper someone forces me to take. I eliminated countless paper files and storage boxes and with the Dropbox account I can access my files on any system. It was by far one of the best decisions I ever made. I even took my paddle board rental business paperless. The hardest part was convincing others that you no longer deal in dead trees. For the uneducated a hard paper copy is like a security blanket to them. It is a constant battle but I have pretty much eliminated all paper from my life. Well worth the effort.

Here’s what I did and they’re all free. This only works if you live in the U.S.

to get off mailing lists I used the DMA Choice website.

https://www.dmachoice.org/dma/member/home.action 

to get off credit card offers I went to https://www.optoutprescreen.com/?rf=t

to get off telemarketing lists I went to https://www.donotcall.gov/

the Do Not Call list doesn’t work if a company has business with you like your credit card companies, charities, political parties, and survey research. However these business do have their own do not call list but you have to ASK to be on their do not call lists, otherwise they will keep on calling you and bugging you. I work at a calling center and have to explain to clients about these exceptions all the time.

Personally, I have a Skype # that I give out to businesses, my bank, employer, etc. That way I can still be reached but it’s not a personal #. My cell # is the one that I give out to family and friends. That way if a breach of security happens like it sometimes does at big companies, then my # isn’t going to be shared with strangers. 

I also don’t have a land-line phone and not having one means that there is less of a way of companies to target you. If you want to get off mailing lists I also suggest explaining to a clerk that your household is going “green” and that you don’t want to waste trees. If they ask you for an email address because a lot of companies are now, then give them a junk email address that you made especially for junk email. 

There are also disposable email addresses that you can get http://10minutemail.com for websites that ask you to register. Although a more convincing one would be a Yahoo or Hotmail address. 

OpenOffice.org -> it’s free, it’s really good and it has a built-in pdf-”printer”.

btw. i would love to read more about free software and free OS in your blog because i believe that’s something one can save a fortune on. i use linux and i love it! (it’s free, it works, IMHO it works better than windows… there are linux distros out there that are really easy to use, like ubuntu or linux mint – even my 62-year-old mother loves ubuntu because it’s so easy to use, and she is really no geek…)

some days ago i saw microsoft office 2010 in store – the student version is over 100 euros (in austria). open office is as good, and it’s free. i even use it for calculations and analyses for university (like material flow accounting) and it works dreams! (it seems that the 2010 MS office is full of bugs i had to use it at university and it never did what i told)

Great post. I’ve been trying to go paperless for several years, with varying degrees of success. Maybe this will give me the motivation to finally fix that :pJust a few thoughts from a Mac user’s perspective:

1. Mac users get PDF-saving built in to anything that can be printed If you hit File > Print, there’s a button in the lower left corner named “PDF”. One of the options is “Save to PDF”. Really useful.

2. Another good bit of backup software for Mac users is SuperDuper! It really doesn’t matter which one you use, but it’s nice to have alternatives. Also, I find both of these more useful than Time Machine because they make bootable backups, meaning that if your hard drive dies, you can plug the drive into another Mac and be up and running in minutes. But use Time Machine if you can’t use anything else, ‘cos anything’s better than nothing!

3. If you’re using Lion, FileVault is way better than before, and supports external disk encryption for backups. I haven’t had a performance hit since enabling it, but I do have more peace of mind.

— Alex