Paper is becoming more and more irrelevant as technology evolves and finds better ways to replace it. While the physical stuff still has a place in our hearts, going paperless saves trees, reduces clutter, and makes things easier to find. Take a little time this weekend to bring your excess paper into the digital world.
Years and thousands of articles ago, when I started at Lifehacker, the first feature I ever wrote was designed to be a complete guide to digitizing your life. A lot can change in a few years. Now we have so many things to digitize. While the post is still a relevant resource, we've seen plenty of other options since.
Documents
You have a couple of options when it comes to digitizing documents. If you have a good scanner (the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i, Doxie, and even an all-in-one printer has worked well in our use), you can put on a movie (or two) and scan in all your documents for an afternoon. Alternatively, 1DollarScan will digitize your documents for you on the cheap. OfficeDrop offers handy software to make that a little easier, and even provides OCR. Doo can manage those newly-scanned documents (and others) on OS X, Windows, and via the web for free. Yep for OS X is another clever option, but costs a bit. Many people like to store their PDFs in Evernote because it searches the full text.
Photos
A good scanner, like those mentioned above, make digitizing your photos a lot easier (although you may need a dedicated photo and slide scanner for larger and more complex projects). Aside from a great photo management app, the only thing you're missing post-scanning is EXIF data in the image. A Better Finder Attributes (OS X), XnView (Windows), and jhead (Linux) let you add that information manually. If you don't want to do the work yourself, there are many photo scanning services. While we haven't tried them out ourselves and can't make an official recommendation, a few popular options include ScanCafe, PhotoBin, and RitzPix.
Books, Magazines, and Comic Books
While many prefer their collection of paperbacks, books, magazines, and comics have evolved in the digital world. They're now more of an interactive experience and not just a simple page. That said, you may not want to repurchase digital copies of all your paper-based entertainment. Scanning books and magazines requires a more specialized setup, so using services like 1DollarScan is often a better option. That said, if you prefer the DIY route you can make your own book scanner for about $20.
When it comes to comic books, Whitson recently took his collection digital. You can follow his guide to do the same. He bought some, scanned others, and found other ways to obtain digital versions of the comics he already owned. This points to one last option: if you're truly going digital, sell your physical books and use that money to purchase newer copies. It may not cover every purchase, but you may not want digital copies of everything. Scan some, sell others, and buy a few new things. A combination of these techniques is often the most cost- and time-effective.
Receipts
Receipts are tough to keep track of, but managing them is important for budgeting and when doing your taxes. I like OneReceipt because it automatically pulls receipts directly from your email inbox so you don't have to do much work at all. If you have a paper receipt you need to digitize and add to one receipt, you can use your iPhone (unfortunately there's no Android app at the moment, but Digital Receipts is a free alternative).
There's a lot of paper in our lives and it's a huge source of clutter, so use this weekend to get on top of it all and start a nice, digital collection. Happy Friday everyone!
Photo by Masato OHTA, F Delventhal, and Ben Osteen.