5 Ways that Going Paperless Has Improved Our Lives

Usually when you see the word “paperless” in the title of one of my posts, you can count on Donnie being the one who wrote it. He is the paperless guru in our family; the rest of us just get to benefit from his incredible organizational habits. 🙂 Today, though, I wanted to tell my side of the paperless story to give you an idea of what the paperless lifestyle looks like from the “other” spouse’s perspective.

Unlike Donnie, I wasn’t always 100% sold on going paperless. When he first brought up the idea, I thought it would just be a phase that he went through for a while and then would move on to something else. {Shhhh…don’t tell him I said that! 😉 } Even after he started scanning and purging our mountains of old paperwork, I was skeptical. Would digitizing all of our documents and files really make that big of a difference?

Donnie kept up his scanning and fine-tuned his paperless workflow, and I was thrilled to let him do his thing, especially since my part mainly consisted of dropping any important paperwork in his inbox and letting him handle it from there. And after not too long, I started to notice that this whole paperless thing was becoming pretty handy. Why? These are my top 5 reasons:

1. It’s a lifesaver for scatterbrained people like me.

I would consider myself an organized person but also a creative person, and I fully blame the creative part for my scatterbrained tendencies. Unless I have something written down on a list, I’m likely to forget it… like the one time I forgot to put our new insurance card in the car and didn’t have it when the auto repair place needed to see it. Instead of having to run back home to grab it or call my insurance company to have them fax it over, I was able to use my phone to pull up the copy of the insurance card that Donnie had scanned into Evernote and email it to the mechanic within seconds.

Another time when we were taking Caleb to have a minor procedure done, I forgot to bring a piece of paper with important details on it. (#mommyfail. But in my defense, we had to be there at 5 am!) Donnie’s paperless system came to the rescue again, and we were able to access the digital version of the paperwork from our phones.

2. It’s like Pinterest for my whole life.

Evernote, the software we use to store our information digitally, kind of feels like a personal Pinterest on steroids. Not only can I save and organize important blog posts, articles, and ideas, but all of my personal information is also neatly sorted and available in a few clicks any time I need it.

I was grocery shopping once, for example, and couldn’t remember the exact dietary restrictions the doctor had given one of our family members. Not wanting to buy the wrong foods, I was able to access Evernote on my phone and pull up a copy of the literature from the doctor that we had scanned, which listed what was okay and what wasn’t. Problem solved!

(Unlike Pinterest, all of my information stored in Evernote is private and for my use only, obviously, so unless I choose to share my files with someone, they are locked down tight.)

3. It makes tax time oh-so-easy.

Oh yes, April 15th is almost upon us, but we are never running around like crazy people trying to gather up receipts and paperwork when tax time rolls around. Throughout the year, we have already scanned, tagged, and organized all of our pertinent documents and have them all ready to go when it’s time to tackle taxes.

4. It helps to eliminate clutter.

If you have been around this blog for very long at all, you know that I hate, hate, hate clutter! I am constantly purging and rearranging and organizing to try to eliminate as much clutter as possible from our home. With our paperless system, one huge area of clutter– paper– is automatically eliminated. I don’t have to worry about searching through a filing cabinet to find a piece of paper that I may or may not have kept. We don’t have random stacks of paper laying around our house that need to be filed. And not only do we not have the clutter that paper brings, we can easily get to a digital copy of that would-be clutter-causing-but-sometimes-important paperwork any time we want.

5. It gives us peace of mind.

This may be my most favorite feature of our paperless lifestyle. Since we have all of our important information stored digitally with multiple backups, we never have to worry about losing or misplacing documents. We don’t have to worry about paperwork getting ruined if something would happen to a filing cabinet. We don’t even have to worry about forgetting paperwork or not having information at appointments or if we’re traveling– we always have everything we need right at our fingertips, and that’s pretty powerful stuff.

As much as I hate to admit it, this is one of those instances when I had to swallow my pride and tell Donnie, “You were right! Paperless is most definitely the way to go!” It has truly made a hugely positive impact on our home, our organizational systems, and our lives.

If you’ve ever thought about going paperless but weren’t sure where to start, be sure to pop over and check out our eBook The Paperless Home: How to Use Evernote to Organize Your Life! This eBook will walk you through the process of going paperless step-by-step and will help to develop a simple paperless workflow so that maintaining your new paperless lifestyle will be easy!

If you have any tips or tricks on curbing paper clutter or going paperless, we’d love to hear them in the comments! Have a wonderful week, friends!