The Best Apps You Need To Finally Go Paperless
The Official Toolkit to Unlocking a Paperless Routine
There’s hundreds of productivity applications out there.
Maybe even millions.
With so many resources, it can be tough to work out which ones can bed activated for your paperless journey in an effort to reduce the amount of paper you use on a daily basis.
Going paperless doesn’t mean installing every single productivity application you find and wishing for the best, it’s using a set of tools to replicate the processes you use in person with paper, without going overboard.
Before we jump into the applications:
Do check out our latest articles here on Medium all about going paperless at home, in the office and on the go.
Start by learning how to create your paperless set-up, then dive into a few of the ways you can develop positive paperless habits.
The Best Apps For Going Paperless
These applications will help you to begin your journey with going paperless. It’s worth spending time to learn how to use and optimise all of these applications for daily use, even outside of paperless goals.
We’ve selected five to keep you focused on your paperless workflow:
Google Drive
Store all your files and documents in Google’s leading storage site. The one thing Google Drive allows you to do is store and create any files, whatever the size, or the complexity. Perfect for starting documents, without the need for paper in the process. The share-ability of the documents, allowing team members or external parties to edit means no more printing things out.
TIP: Create folders and start keeping things organized all within Google Drive, this will help add clarity and a location as you expand your use.
Dropbox Paper
Dropbox is another similar storage site, designed to allow you to store files and resources, with a little less collaborative functions than Google Drive, it’s a useful storage resource for millions of business owners and professionals.
In the last 2 years, they released Dropbox Paper, a tool for creating documents inside of Dropbox, perfect for reducing short and long proposal documents or even notes from you and your team’s meetings.
TIP: Make use of Dropbox’s free storage limits and create a team workspace for you and your team to store new documents.
GoodNotes
There’s a host of experiences going paperless that you can feel you are missing. One might be the lack of handwriting, a preferred note-taking experience for many people, another might be annotation of documents, printing and annotating is still a popular tactic in offices worldwide.
GoodNotes tries to bridge the gap here. Available on iOS, GoodNotes provides a paper-like experience for iOS devices, inc. iPad Pros — allowing you scribble notes up easily. But GoodNotes is more than just a piece of paper on a digital device: It lets you create multi-media notebooks and combine images, PDF, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, blank notes paper and more in a single file.
TIP: Use GoodNotes search to decipher your handwriting and find notes from your iOS scribblings and drawings.
Scanbot
We still might be using documents, or even storing them as a newbie to the paperless process. Enter Scanbot. Time to clear out all of those documents.
Using Scanbot’s camera abilities, you can start scanning on iOS and Android all of your documents and files covering your workspace and get them stored as a PDF, into Evernote or other popular services like Dropbox or Drive.
Easy Peasy!
With the free application, this will be a great companion to getting all of that paper digitally ready to explore and use, using a trustworthy resource to clip and scan in, in high-quality, into your new everyday paperless storage bay.
TIP: Use the cropping features to fully modify all of your document’s size, colorisation and more to get the best end result when you’re searching.
iOS Files
The default iOS file manager which has been introduced with iOS 11 often gets overlooked when it comes to paperless working. At first sight, it doesn’t seem to be special but the power and beauty of this file manager lie within the deep integration with the operating system. Naturally, the app makes use of all of iOS 11’s features like Drag & Drop. Being able to drag documents in and out of the Files app makes the app a real productivity allrounder.
It works well together with other cloud storages like GoogleDrive and Dropbox. Developers can integrate the Files API in their own apps so that data from GoogleDrive can be opened right from the Files app.
TIP: Place the Files app in your iPad’s dock to make best of use of it. Pressing the app icon lets you access your most recently used files. These can even be dragged out of the miniature view to drop them in other apps such as GoodNotes.
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.
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📝Recommended Read — Why the iPad is the real answer to your meeting notes nightmares (READ HERE)
Another Recommended Read — How to go paperless at home or at work in 2018? Adopt these 5 habits. (READ HERE) 📝
