Getting Started with a Paperless Office
Episode 002
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Points Covered
The benefits of running a paperless office
The tools you’ll need in order to go paperless
The first steps to achieving a paperless office
The good habits to form moving forward
Links & Resources
Episode Transcript
Hey guys, and welcome to Episode Two of The Seriously Sorted Podcast. Today we are talking about how to start a paperless office. I'm going to run you through the benefits, the tools you're going to need, the first steps that you're going to do in order to set it all up, and the habits that you should form moving forward. So let's get started.
The Benefits
Firstly, the benefits. Okay, first benefit is kind of an obvious one, you'll be able to reduce your paper consumption, which is obviously a benefit both to the environment and to your wallet.
Secondly, you're going to likely have a tidier workspace. I definitely believe in "declutter your space to declutter your mind". And so for me, this one is a really important one.
Thirdly, when you keep everything sort of electronically or in the cloud, it does allow for templates and automation, which is another great benefit and I'll probably talk about that in a future episode in more depth.
But finally, and this is sort of the benefit that I'm going to be focusing on for the episode, it allows you the freedom to work from anywhere when you don't have to be bogged down by the physical paper and the physical things that are usually at your dedicated desk if you have one. It allows you the freedom to work from wherever you are, which is amazing.
There's obviously many more reasons to go paperless. But I do find that those four are sort of the core key ones that my clients have on their list of motivations.
Tools and software that you're going to *need* to set up your paperless office
Okay, so on to the tools and software that you're going to need in order to set up your paperless office. I will make one little asterix note that I'm going to assume that you have a computer and that you have access to the internet, obviously. Now, anything that I mentioned here will have a free version, so don't freak out that you need to invest a lot of money into being able to go paperless you absolutely do not. The biggest investment is going to be your time to set it up.
cloud documents storage
So the first thing that we're going to need is some kind of cloud documents storage that you can access on all of your devices. So that's something like Google Drive or Dropbox. Now the other thing I would suggest is making sure that depending on whether you have a Windows device, or Apple devices, Android devices, just check that you can access your documents through the software on all of those devices that you're after. Now, the reason we don't want to save documents directly to your computer anymore is simply so that again, we can work from wherever we are. And sometimes that might be when we don't actually have our computer we might just have an on an iPad or an iPhone with us.
task or project management software
The next thing we're going to want is a way to manage our tasks and our to-do's so we need some kind of task or project management software. You can either use your to-do list in your email client. So, often there'll be something some kind of basic To Do List built into Outlook or Gmail. Or you might want to look into something a little bit more robust, like a project management software like ClickUp or Trello or Asana. These kind of software allow you to categorise your projects or your to to-do's, assign them to yourself or to others, set start dates, or due dates and many other ways that we can kind of cut and split out priorities. So again, the reason we want to do something like this is again so that we're not relying on random pieces of paper and notes and emails to figure out what our priorities are moving forward. We want to have a good visual of what we need to do at any point in time from any device.
a way to scan paper documents
Okay, next up, we need to have a way to scan documents in that are paper. So if you have a printer with a built in scanner, tick, that's great. And if not just search on your Apple or Android device, for example, there are plenty of free apps that let you sort of take a photo or a scan of your document pages. And that will upload them to whatever cloud documents storage method you have chosen to use.
A note taking device (by hand or digitally)
The final tool you're going to need, it's actually a bit of a tool and a bit of a decision to make - is whether you're actually going to continue taking notes by hand, or whether you're actually going to try to take digital notes. So what I mean by this is, you can either keep taking your notes traditionally by hand. Consider though that you might need to start transcribing any specific important things up into the cloud and start taking any to-do's and putting them directly into your project management or to do list software or you can go the digital route and look to use an electronic notebook. So these are things like Evernote, OneNote, or Notion just as a few examples. If you are going to go the digital note taking route, just make sure that you choose one of the apps again, that is compatible with a number of your devices so that if you're taking notes, for example, on your iPad, you can still have the visibility on your computer. And it also comes down to usability and the user interface of the app. So I definitely encourage you to download multiple options and just have a go and trial and error and see which one you just enjoy using more.
Okay, so we know the benefits of going paperless. We know what we're going to need to go paperless now, how the heck do you start?
As I mentioned a little bit earlier, the biggest investment that you're going to need to make is your time to just get this up and running and started, but I promise once you've made that initial investment, of sorting everything out and getting a system going, the ease of use moving forward will be so freeing, I promise you.
01. desk Declutter
So, number one, we need a desk declutter, probably really obvious. So I'm gonna need you to have a look at your desk or your workspace, wherever you have the most paper really, and throw anything out that you no longer use, and throw anything out that you have on email or already saved electronically, because we know that this is simply a double up. Cool. Once you've done that, I want you to review what you have kept. What are the things that didn't make the bin pile? Hopefully, if you've done this right, the things that you have left are likely going to have some kind of action with them, am I right? So you've kept them because they're associated with you needing to do something, which is awesome. Okay, so with the pieces of paper that we have left, I want you to one, scan them in to your computer, or your cloud software, I should say. And two, assign or create a task that was associated with that piece of paper in your to do list or your project management software, whatever you're going to choose, and then repeat for everything else that you've still got on your desk.
I am actually just going to interrupt myself here and say that if you are in an industry that has legal obligations around saving hard copies of documents, then you'll know who you are and what those obligations are. I'm mostly talking about the day to day operational notes of things, not anything to do with your legal obligation. Okay, cool. Just wanted to add that little disclaimer there.
02. digital declutter
So next we're going to do a digi declutter so that is not dissimilar to your desk declutter we want to go through your emails, we want to delete or archive the ones that are no longer relevant, or the ones from months ago that are staying in your inbox and let's be real, you're never going to reply to them. We're going to leave simple replies in your inbox. But we're going to catalogue the larger actions in your new task management system and then file away the email because you will now have that task or project properly documented, and we know that it no longer needs to be in your inbox
03. FILING DETOX
The last place to do your detox is actually in your current filing system, if that is currently saved to your computer. So this is where we want to start migrating and moving things across to Dropbox or Google Drive, whatever it is you've decided to use and make sure that as you go, this is a great time to do a bit of a spring clean and make sure that you have things saved in the right folders and that you have a naming convention for documents and folders that makes sense to you. So go ahead and do that next. Once you've done that, we now have a beautiful clean slate to start a new paperless office life. Yes.
Now, to create some new habits
Right, so the last thing we want to do is I guess, create some new habits moving forward, because this might be a very new concept that you'll need to be conscious of and make an effort to stick to in the short term. But eventually, a lot of these things will become second nature to you, which is great.
So firstly, I want to say number one, when you get a new email, decide whether it requires a simple reply - leave it in your inbox, whether it's a bigger task - you want to move the task into your project management and file the email, or whether it has an attachment and if it has a document attachment. We also want to make sure that that gets filed away properly in our new cloud storage software, cool. Two, paper docs, we always are still going to get given paper documents, even if we don't print them out ourselves. So just want to make sure that once you've used that document in the meeting that you decide whether you need to keep it for some kind of hardcopy reason, or whether you want to scan it in immediately to the document cloud software, and check out the physical paper. Three, note taking this is probably where the habits need to form the most because again, if you've gone digi notetaking there'll be some new habits that we need to form but regardless of old school, or digi, make sure you get into the habit of transcribing any tasks that need to be done at the end of each day. Only use one notebook at a time and scan your notes in as you go if they are relevant to particular projects.
And that's basically it. I know we've only just touched the surface of how to go paperless and there's so much more that you can do, but I wanted to just give you a small taste of how you can get started. If you have any questions about this episode, please get in touch with me, I love talking about going paperless. I love my paperless office and I'm always looking for new tips and tricks to make it run even more efficiently. I'm definitely going to have future episodes that focus on the templating and automation side of task management as well as the project management software that you can use, so make sure you stay tuned for future episodes for that.
Your podcast hostess
Lauren Stratford
Hi, I’m Lauren and I help overwhelmed creatives like you embrace their strengths, get clear on their customer journey and maximise their impact (without adding to the never ending task list!).
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