Is a ‘paper-free’ office really possible?
Creating a clutter-free and paper-free environment will massively help your productivity and efficiency.
When you run a business, however much you rely on technology to reduce your use of paper you’ll still find that there are office-dinosaurs out there who just LOVE to write things by hand, or type letters, or send paper bills in the post. It seems that you just cannot get away from using paper!
There are so many reasons why using paper wastes space, burns time and uses up valuable resources. Getting rid of it from your office will allow you to do so much more with the space you save and also give you a much faster working environment. So how do you reduce the overload, streamline your work area, and get rid of all unnecessary paper?
When we committed to running a ‘paper-free office’ in 2015 we had to invest in two key pieces of kit to help us do this quickly and well. I suggest you do the same – the first is a FAST double-sided scanner that saves copies to pdf.
- A ScanSnap S1500 scanner by Fujitsu ( discontinued now but the replacement is the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500). It isn’t cheap at £350. Worth every penny though, as it scans super-fast and then saves each document into your chosen folder on your drive. We use Google drive as it is so fast and searchable which means you never lose a document.
- An efficient shredder, and a young shredding assistant to do the work! The former you can buy from Amazon – our latest one is the AmazonBasics 5-6 Sheet Cross Cut Shredder which is just £30.99 from Amazon. It is fast, takes up to 8 sheets of A4 at a go and also shreds credit cards. The shredding assistant is harder to come by unless you have a ready supply of children impatiently wanting to earn some extra pocket-money. A neighbour’s child will do if you can’t supply your own. A half hour of shredding for £3.50 in return works wonders!
Our maxim is scan-save-shred. We apply this to almost every little teency bit of paper we get in the house: receipts, useful articles from magazines, letters, bills – you name it. We pile ‘em up, scan them in, save them in an online folder and shred ‘em.
It has created cubic megameters in our home office. We no longer have paper clogging up our in-trays, or shelves full of magazine files, or filing cabinets bulging to the brink with documents. De-cluttering your office of paper will bring you mental as well as physical space. But you need to regularly attend to it or the overload happens incrementally!
If you want to know more about how to streamline and systemise your processes, we are running a Property Power Systems Workshop on 2nd Sep about how to use Google to build your business. There will be LOADS of useful ways you can save money, create time, and freedom by using low-cost and no-cost solutions just like this so you can reduce your overload and create true freedom.
For only £99 reserve your place on the morning workshop here: https://goo.gl/JkDzWk
Or the afternoon one here: https://goo.gl/rcSQfz
