by Bill Adler
Two weeks ago I started a mini-series on going paperless.
You can read the first article here: http://bit.ly/WJ01mN
. The second article, about digital sticky notes, is here: http://bit.ly/VGxZLd.
Going paperless doesn't mean digital everything; going paperless
can be as comprehensive or incomplete as suits your style. You may adore paper
books, but prefer not to deal with recycling a newspaper every week. You might
like the precision and planning ability that accompanies having all your
financial records available with a few clicks, but get joy from clipping
recipes from magazines.
One tool that will make going paperless easier, no matter
what kind of paperless world you want to live in, is your smartphone's camera.
Snap and save the receipt, bank statement, magazine article you're reading in
the doctor's office (no, it's not nice to rip out an article), restaurant menu
you want to keep for posterity, picture of a cute dress store (along with its
location, saved automatically in every photo), school report, or job rejection
letter, and whatever else you want.
My go-to app for doing this is Evernote, available for
Android, iOS, PC, Mac: What's especially brilliant about Evernote is that it
not only syncs with my PC, but will index the text in anything I take a picture
of. For example, if I take a photo of an L.L. Bean receipt, Evernote will index
all the words in that receipt. A week, year, decade from now I can search for
"khaki pants" and find that receipt in seconds.
If you want to explore the idea of using your smartphone
as a major tool for achieving a total or partial paperless life, here are some
apps, in addition to Evernote, www.evernote.com,
that can help you achieve that.
The first is your phone's regular camera app. Snap now
and file later works, too. Anything you can take a picture of can become a part
of your own permanent record: Just email the photo to yourself, or copy it into
whatever program you use to keep stuff. Even your email program can be used for
a paperless life.
FastEver Snap (iOS) http://bit.ly/14oirQ3, speeds up the process of scanning by photo into your smartphone. It's good to
have if you do more than just occasional scanning with your iPhone.
If you want to scan to PDF, give JotNot (iOS) a whirl. It
can scan multipage documents to PDF -- or fax them. For Android there's CamScanner,
http://bit.ly/14oiFqm, among many others
apps.
There are specialty apps for scanning and OCRing business
cards, too. If it's on paper, it can be easily digitized using your
smartphone's camera. Try WorldCard
Mobile, http://bit.ly/VtNgT4, for iPhone
and CamCard, http://bit.ly/117RZ9X, for
Android.
That's all for now about going paperless. Now if you'll
excuse me, I need to clean up a spilled glass of juice with some paper towels.
---
Bill Adler is the co-publisher of the Cleveland Park
Listserv, www.cleveland-park.com.
He is the author of "Boys and Their Toys: Understanding Men by
Understanding Their Relationship with Gadgets," http://amzn.to/rspOft. He tweets at
@billadler.
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