Many of us spend time organizing their computers…Courtesy of O’Reilly’s Onlamp.com, we present this simple article, with simple advice on ridding yourself of paper, slowly. Here’s our version.

1. Document Control System. The simplest one is, of course, a simple folder structure. Using directories requires no special software. That also means it has no ability to assist or monitor your organization. The author of the article suggests Perforce, which is a commercial product that offers a free version. We recommend the alternative, the free open-source Subversion, based on CVS, which is used by programmers. PC Magazine had a good basic article on it you can find here.
2. A Scanner – To get your documents into the computer and out of your hands. One with a reliable ADF(Automatic Document Feeder), will allow you to work much faster in ridding yourself of documents than otherwise.
3. Organize your files – You have to be able to find your documents by creating a hierarchy…a series of directories and subdirectories that allow you to quickly navigate to your files.
4. Integrate your scanned documents with ones created by computer…they are all forms of information. And one useful thing about computers…if something fits in more than one category, you can link your file to both locations.

For a while, we tried Paperport, which came with one of our first scanners. We still have hundreds of files in the proprietary Paperport format we plan to slowly converting to PDF files for the straight documents and JPEG and GIF files for the higher resolution imagery. More on our plans to come….