I detest any physical mail I get in my mailbox, at home or at my firm. What is the point? I get most of my news online, use online or automated bill pay, and ignore promotional materials. I get important messages via email and manage them separately. Paper documents are clunky, they take up a lot of space to store and the information in them is hard to manage or share. I cannot easily find a specific document, unless I have filed it in a particular folder and it then still takes time to sift through other paper documents to find the specific item. With email, we have gotten used to being able to search using keywords and having the information mobile and available at any time. My New Year’s resolution is to simplify my mail, email and documents and to purge my personal life from any paper documents. First, I started to categorize the documents that I absolutely need to keep in hard-copy format, such as birth certificates, marriage certificate, passports, Social Security cards and the deed to our house. The category is fairly small. Others, such as insurance and mortgage information, are important, but can be kept in electronic format only and should be kept as long as the policies are in place. Yet, other documents falling outside of these two categories can be scanned and then destroyed immediately or kept for a short amount of time. (Think bank statements, bills, etc.)
Thus, the universe of physical documents I actually need to retain in my personal life is pretty small. Documents I create myself are kept in electronic format, and I mostly use Google Docs. I do print out convenience copies for review and markup, but after I am done with those for that purpose, I throw them out. If I want to store any markups or hard-copy documents I receive, I use a simple scanning app on my phone. Any scanned documents are stored in systems online and I get rid of the paper document after I check the scan.
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