After recovering from a debilitating back injury during my freshman year of high school, I realized my 23-pound backpack—typical of most high school and college students—had to go. Out of necessity, I designed a digital framework to banish binders, handouts, and textbooks from my workflow. Three years later, I’ve discovered a variety of concrete benefits from using my battle-hardened “paperless” system:
- My backpack now weighs just six pounds, not 23. That’s as if I removed two bowling balls from my daily load!
- Without folders or spiral-bound notebooks to juggle, it’s much easier to keep track of my materials.
- Digital storage means all of my content is easily searchable and organized automatically.
- Because all of my notes and handouts are stored in the cloud and synchronized to all my devices, my content is accessible anywhere—no more forgetting my math homework at home!
While I created my paperless method for use in school, the approach is completely generic—I’ve helped family, teachers, and co-workers eliminate paper in their homes, classrooms, and offices.
The System
The following paragraphs provide an overview of the various components of my paperless system and how they integrate.
iPad
My iPad is my primary note-taking and content-consumption device. Combined with a digital paper app (Notability) and a stylus (the Adonit Jot Pro), the iPad supplants every use case for paper in my daily routine.
Notability
Notability’s powerful writing tools, superior PDF annotation capability, and automatic note export make it the ideal app for note-taking, problem-solving, and brainstorming. Notability can simulate either a pencil or a highlighter, both of which can be customized with a variety of thicknesses and colors. Features like cutting, copying, and pasting sections of my handwriting, undoing mistakes, and erasing entire lines with a tap of the eraser make Notability’s writing experience much more efficient than normal handwriting. Although my handwriting suffers slightly when using a stylus, the ability to zoom in and write on a smaller section of the page improves readability and allows for more efficient use of space. The app can also import PDFs or images that can be annotated with the aforementioned writing tools. Notability’s multi-page notes can be grouped into different subjects. Notes in each subject can be automatically exported as PDFs to folders in Dropbox, Google Drive, or a myriad of other services. I make heavy use this functionality to make my notes accessible on my other devices.
If you find Notability doesn’t suit you, there are countless other options on the App Store, like Penultimate or Noteshelf.
Adonit Jot Pro
After trying a few other capacitive styli, I’ve settled on the Jot Pro by Adonit. While the stylus’ design might seem odd, its plastic disc tip is much more accurate than its rubber-tipped competitors. In addition, the disc’s translucency makes it possible to see the exact point of contact between the stylus and the screen, leading to much more precise handwriting. I’m also a big fan of the stylus’ high-quality aluminum body and comfortable rubber grip. Finally, The stylus is also magnetic, meaning it sticks safely to the edge of my iPad when I carry it.
While I love the Jot Pro, it is definitely not for everyone. If you decide Jot doesn’t appeal to you, try the Bamboo Stylus by Wacom—reviewers (and I) agree it’s the best conventional rubber-tipped stylus currently on the market.
Doxie Go Scanner
Unfortunately, not too many people around me have gone paperless, so I inevitably have to deal with some real paper. By scanning all the paper I’m given, I can easily integrate any handouts I receive into my exclusively digital workflow. My favorite scanner is the Doxie Go, a relatively cheap and intuitive scanner made by Apparent. Scanning with the Doxie Go is very simple; just turn on the device, feed paper into its front, and the Doxie Go will suck the sheet through and spit it out in the back. As shown in the picture below, the battery-powered Doxie Go is also extremely portable. When I’m ready to import scans, I just plug the Doxie Go into my computer, fire up the Doxie software, and click import. Once every page is imported, I can staple pages together into multi-page files, rename them, and export to many different applications and services (Evernote, Dropbox, Photoshop, and more) in a variety of file formats (PDF, PNG, JPG, etc.).
Of course, any other scanner you already own will work just as well—I just prefer Doxie’s extremely simple scanning experience.
Evernote
To me, Evernote is the perfect platform for organizing information, so I use it as the central repository for my digitized materials. Content in Evernote is represented by individual notes, which can be grouped into notebooks and tagged for more specific description. I have a notebook for each school subject (Math, History, Economics, Physics, English, etc.), notebooks for storing personal information like frequent-flier numbers, a miscellaneous notebook called “Notes” for things like project ideas or reading/watching lists, and an “Inbox” notebook for notes that still need to be processed. The beauty of Evernote is that you can organize your notes however you want—for example, Thomas Honeyman uses primarily tags, not notebooks to separate content. You can create a system that works for you. In addition to providing a powerful yet intuitive mental model for categorizing content, Evernote also provides extremely robust search functionality. I can find notes based on note contents, tags, attached files, or other metadata. Because I pay for the company’s Premium service ($44.99/year), text inside PDFs is indexed for search using OCR (an algorithm for recognizing text and handwriting in images). As icing on the cake, Evernote provides clients on almost every platform imaginable, whether web, desktop, tablets, or mobile. As a result, I can access my notes everywhere on demand.
Putting Them All Together
How do I get my various materials into Evernote in the first place? Because Notability doesn’t yet support automatic exporting to Evernote, I’ve set Notability to automatically export notes as PDFs to folders in Dropbox corresponding to each of Notability’s subjects. I then use a service I built called Pype (still experimental) to copy PDFs from Dropbox into various Evernote notebooks. If you don’t want to use my program (definitely not yet ready for the light of day), you can copy each file from Dropbox into its own note yourself. Whenever I scan papers with my Doxie Go, I just export the resultant PDFs directly to Evernote (they appear in my default notebook, “Inbox”) using the Doxie software and triage them to various notebooks manually.
Hopefully I’ve equipped you with enough understanding of my system to try going all-digital yourself. If you successfully free yourself from the crushing weight of the paper in your life, feel free to comment with your story!
