Organizing Your Paperless Set-up

Taking your first steps to going paperless

Francesco D'Alessio

Published in

GoodNotes Blog

7 min readFeb 7, 2018

Going paperless won’t happen overnight. Let’s be clear about that.

Whether you are looking to go paperless in the home or in the office, things will take their time to fall into place in your efforts to transition to a fully paperless lifestyle.

For some, this might be a week long process, and for others maybe months of the year will be taken up to moving all of their day-to-day activities into a paperless approach.

Let’s dive into how you can go about starting that journey off:

The Paperless Individual

Most likely you are envisioning a minimalist sat down on his/her laptop, with only a plant pot on the desk to fill the space, and tech to do the rest.

Don’t fret, no transformations needed.

The brilliant thing about being paperless, is that you can do it in your own style. This is something we’ll dive into later on in this article.

Naturally, people have a pre-conceived idea about the paperless set-up.

For many, maybe it’s a person solely dedicated to using digital resources with very little respect for others’ use of paper. One that has to buy an iPad for their children, in an effort to receive less handmade drawings to pin-up.

This is crazy and isn’t the case.

The pursuit of paperless doesn’t mean you have to give up paper all together.

There’s hundreds of thousands of paperless folk wandering around with journals, notebooks, post-it notes in their bag for a real purpose.

There’s something original and notable about the use of paper.

For me, I tend to have an active journalling process that uses my gorgeous high-quality Baron Fig Raspberry Honey notebook, where I can actively express my emotions and capture those using that medium, saying that, 99% of other elements in my day are paperless.

Of course it is also possible to use a digital version of a journal but that is on your to decide.

Being mindful about the use of paper and it’s benefits is important.

There are certain factors that you do need to be combining, in an effort to deliver the best paperless results. Let’s dive into some of these attributes.

A successful paperless individual adheres to these unofficial rules:

Implements a paperless process where paper can be irrelevant
Controls their productivity/workflow using paperless tools
Mindful about the benefits of paper in everyday activities

All of these attributes tend to make up the best of the paperless army.

Using all of these in tandem will provide an enjoyable paperless experience.

Organizing Your Paperless Set-up

So we’ve reached the good part! It’s over to you.

The paperless world awaits. Let’s get you on that path to a stress-free daily routine without the clutter of paper around your desk and home space.

Strong Foundations

First things first. Your ideology has to adapt. Going paperless isn’t happening overnight. You’ll need to build up a strong framework to support your efforts.

The best trees in the forest are built with strong, confident roots.

Making sure you have an effective foundatation will be important. So, how do you build that from scratch. It’s simple.

Immersion.

Starting out you’ll need to dedicate a whole half a day for:

Researching the digital tools
Clearing out your environment
Implementing your all the tools
Setting your clear schedule

The reason we recommend half a day, is surprising, it’s a lengthy process.

1. Researching the Digital Tools

Organising your paperless set-up won’t take too long.

Investing this time will be useful looking back!

Saving time for later will be valuable. Especially when you’ve gone all gorilla in pulling your current process apart.

Start by using YouTube or Google to search for the core 3 resources.
You’ll preferably need a To-Do List App, Calendar & Note-Taker.
Pick your opinions and agree to stick with them for 1-month.
Use the full free trial and create your own account.
If you aren’t sure, don’t invest money into the resource.

Starting like this will help to create a good foundation and be ready to start adding things into the correct spaces.

Jumping back to the idea of 3 resources.

From experience and recommendation, keeping the following three tools close to you will help to improve your development dramatically.

To-Do List: for capturing tasks/to-dos (actionable items)
Calendar: for capturing events/activities (time-orientated items)
Note-Taker: for capturing notes/ideas (static text items)

These three tools can help you get 90% of the work done when it comes to organizing your own set-up and are paramount when it comes to paperless organization. A concept you can definitely embrace.

2. Clearing the Environment

Okay, so you’ve found all the time to give everything a spring clean.

Great news!

So it’s really easy to do.

Start with your desk. Pile all of the loose paper, files, documents, folders into the middle of the room.
Take 5-minutes to overview what’s left on your desk
Remove what isn’t immediately needed or hasn’t been used in 3-months. This will help with the foundational efforts to remove paper.
Once you’re happy. Head over to your pile on the floor.

If you’re looking to take control of your personal items in the same room, try the Marie Kondo Method — worth a try if you find spare time.

3. Implementing the Tools

Great, so you have the workstation clear.

Start by getting your tools ready to hand!

It’s easy once you use and get to know the full power of the resources you’ve chosen as they’ll help you to master the document saving process.

Start by getting rid of all the paper you don’t need
Clear any drawers and add them to the pile
Find a spot for the most important folders (that can’t die)
Begin using the tool to save in the documents
If you aren’t able to, find the digital files and bring them in
For now, let’s not organise, focus on capturing them
Use the document scanner on your tool (most have them)
Find the digital alternatives, if you scanned them in incorrectly.
Trash any of the paper you are comfortable to

Once you’ve got all that paper stored into a digital format, it’ll become a lot easier, stress will start to ease out and so much more.

4. Setting up your own base & schedule

Getting set-up was the hardest thing, but now you have the majority of your paper in the vicinity into a tool.

Now it’s time to organize that tool

Creating your own set-up is fun and will help you to create a mini base online.

Start by choosing the dozen notebooks you need
Organize them clearly, with definitive names
Use clear titles to name your notes/documents
Keep things simple and avoid messing it up digitally
Create a scheduled time to clean your desk weekly and daily (setting recurring reminders in your to-do app can be helpful)
Keeping things clear will save you time and effort and the overload of paper to be even on the horizon.

Once you’ve got a set-up.

Keeping things clean and clear and avoid the use of paper will be important.

Go ahead and read the articles below to learn more about how to do so in every day activities. They dive into a very important conversation about how to make sure your efforts of paperless are sustainable.

Let us know your recommendations for paperless work or any tips for working paperless at home in the comments. We’d love to hear all your productivity tips and tricks.