4 Tips For Making Your Home Office Paperless
Is your home office brimming over with file cabinets and stacks of old paperwork? A great way to make your home office more organized and streamlined, and much less cluttered, is to go paperless. A paperless home office also leads to less paper waste, so it's environmentally responsible as well. Here are four tips for making your home office paperless:
Buy a Scanner
Once you buy a nice scanner for your home office, you can immediately begin getting rid of old, accumulated paperwork. Old bank statements, business receipts, written correspondence, etc., can all be scanned and filed electronically. Then you can simply shred the originals in order to free up a lot of document storage space for other things.
Unsubscribe from Junk Mail
Junk mail in your actual mailbox may be even more annoying than spam email. Junk mail not only wastes a ton of paper, but it can also contain personal information would-be identity thieves can use to steal your identity and tarnish your credit. For this reason, junk mail should be shredded instead of just tossed in the recycling bin.
Better yet, prevent junk mail from being mailed to you at all by unsubscribing. You can write to or call individual companies, or use this service to stop receiving junk mail from credit card and insurance companies.
Pay Your Bills Online
These days, there is no real reason to pay your bills by check, or receive paper bills in the mail at all. Most banks, credit card, insurance and utility companies offer online billing and payments. Signing up for automatic payments that are debited from your bank account on the due date each month makes things even easier. Besides further streamlining your home office, paying all of your bills online also prevents hassles like checks being lost in the mail or arriving late.
Use a Cloud Storage System
Since you will no longer be saving physical hard copies of your business documents, it's important to keep everything stored securely, with backups in case anything happens to your computer.
A good option is to save things to your hard drive (or an external storage device), and then back everything up using a cloud storage system. Most cloud storage systems now offer convenient features, like access from multiple devices and syncing with your email and calendar.
By following these simple tips, your home office will soon be organized and paperless.