Paperless in 2013

For 2013, I've been playing around with the fantasy of going paperless. The idea was prompted by this episode of In Beta, where Gina Trapani and Kevin Purdy discuss the plausibility of going paperless. This lofty goal is right up my alley: for years I have been working on decreasing the amount of physical objects I have. Sure, the main reason I want to have everything in a digital form is to have everything easily accessible and always at my fingertips, but it's also an attempt to live a happier, simpler life filled with fewer physical things.

My DVDs and Blu-rays are ripped and live on a server underneath my bed. All my music exists in MP3 form and lives in my Ubuntu One cloud, as well as Google Music (redundancy is important, kids). Nearly all my books are digital; only my current college textbooks remain, as well as one shelf containing my original Harry Potter paperbacks, and my copy of V for Vendetta. Also, as you might expect from a computer enthusiast who has always had access to a word processor, all of the documents that I’ve written are Word and ODT files. That said, my life is still filled with annoying bits of paper.At first I dismissed the idea. There is no way I could go paperless right now, I figured. As a college kid, going paperless ain’t gonna happen until they hand me my diploma. Paper-free might not be feasible, but paper-lite is very doable. The goal isn’t eliminating paper altogether, but instead trying to decrease the amount of paper in my life to the absolute minimum. I’ll blog about my attempt here from time to time, but to start I am going to mention some things off-hand I can think of to get started:<ol><li>Ditch the paper planner and instead use a calendar and agenda manager. Last semester I had a class that almost every first-time CompSci student has to take called Student in University. One of our projects was to keep everything in a university-issued paper student planner (which, just as a fun note, my professor never bothered to check). Now, I’m free to do whatever works for me. This will include keeping track of due dates in Maya, the elementary calendar app, and jotting down my tasks and to-do list in Agenda, a simple task list app for elementary.</li><li>Use my tablet instead of printing at all times possible. Instead of printing out my class schedule, campus maps, and other stuff that I need to hold in my hand and carry around, I’ll save it to my Nexus 7 Android tablet and use that.</li><li>Say ‘no’ to paper receipts when it makes sense to do so, and recycle them the other times. After pumping gas I’m always presented with the option, “would you like to print a receipt.” Instead of ‘yes’, I am going to choose ‘no.’ I am going to also look into methods for scanning receipts and recycling them afterwards.</li><li>No more Post-It notes. I’m a heavy note-leaver. I like to jot stuff down so I’ll see it and come back to it later. I’ll still do that, but in a more efficient, less wasteful way. I’ll either write it to my to-do list in Agenda, or jot it down in a note in Footnote.</li><li>No cash. I’ve never been a huge cash carrier, so this one is, admittedly, not a big change. I certainly won’t turn anyone away from giving me cash, but in most instances I’ll only carry Debit and Credit. If they don’t take a card, I don’t buy from them.</li><li>Work on Scanning Important Documents. This one isn’t really going to make me paperless, but it will help me not have to ever look at the paper that I do have to keep. As a convenience factor, and as a way of having a good backup, I am going to look into scanning documents like birth certificates, medical records, insurance information, social security information, etc., into digital versions. I will have to find a good piece of hardware for the scanning, good software for the saving/storing/editing, and, of course, a safe, encrypted way of storing such sensitive information. Just as a side note, I’d also like to scan old photographs, too.</li></ol>