Friday, February 1, 2013

Year of living paperlessly

With apologies to Christopher Koch (Year of Living Dangerously) I am trying a bit of a 'science experiment' this year, an attempt to live as paperlessly as I can this year, at least for my work as an IT consultant.

Here is an except from a Q&A post I published to LinkedIn a few weeks ago when embarking on my experiment...

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Year of living paperlessly**

** as far as possible at least

Just looking for some new ideas on how to live as paperlessly as possible this year - mostly from a work point of view but will also try out at home.

My ideal use case is:

When I come into contact with some paper I need, I 'scan' or take a pic and dont need the paper any more.
... be able to make notes on scanned/photo'ed paper I receive.
... tag the content I create/ capture and make search, discovery and retrieval easy where ever I am (assuming I have device with me or connection to 'cloud')

My current devices include an iPad, iPhone, Mac at home and PC laptop at work so anything cross device, cross OS would also be good.

The apps I currently use include:
- Evernote - plan to keep this but also looking for companion apps to collect and use content I collect
- Notetaker (for iPad) - ok, but looking for better ability to annotate and also 'tag' my content
- Dropbox - plan to keep for storage but would like to be able to tag content easier and search it better

Open to any other ideas on how to improve things, especially in apps that make it easy to scan/ take a pic of paper and then file it electronically. Currently I use Evernote for this and its ok but looking for ways to make it better.

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Here is a link to some of the replies I have received so far... http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/information-technology/information-storage/TCH_ITS_IST/1087577-12337876?browseIdx=0&sik=1359662184595&goback=%2Eamq

I'll be following this blog up with a 'so far so good' post to share some of the ideas I have tried, some that have worked and some which Im still working on.

In the meantime, I thought I would also share this interesting site that I came across... http://paperfreeclass.wordpress.com/

Its a very interesting site that uses WordPress to provide the digital hub for the classroom and how the students and the teacher interact with each other and, as a by product, cut down on their paper usage.

Im using a Wiki to cut down on my own paper usage but so far its just a local one that uses TiddlyWiki ... http://tiddlywiki.com/

TiddlyWiki is great but I have aspirations to upgrade to Confluence http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/overview/team-collaboration-software so I can easily share my info with others and have others contribute as well

1 comment:

  1. Just to add to this entry, I found this article today in an email from Macworld Australia: http://www.macworld.com/article/2043300/the-mac-office-embracing-the-nearly-paperless-future.html#.UeiAUiY3DJy.twitter

    I can identify with a lot of the points made - going paperless is not an 'end point' its a journey :)

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