Top 10 Tips to Win the Paper Chase

This is a guest post from professional organizer Elizabeth Lulu Miranda of Mercury Organizing Professionals. This post is part of our Spring Cleaning with Zeal campaign. Check back next Friday for tips and tricks from Organizing With You.

If you don’t have a system you’ll always have that overwhelming feeling that you can’t catch up. Take charge of that information overload because it won’t stop until you decide it stops. 

1. First, back up your computer as many times as you can afford. Burn CD’s. Use www.carbonite.com or www.backblaze.com. Back up to an external hard drive.

2. Stop mail. Cancel catalogs, make a request at stopjunkmail.org, use the PaperKarma App to have them stop junkmail for you.

3. Reduce your mail. Have bills, bank statements & financial statements emailed to you instead of snail mail. Banks offer online bill paying services. 

4. Don’t Print. Save documents as a .doc or .pdf files & keep in an labeled folder.

5. Take it to the cloud. A cloud is a service that holds your data online. Try Dropbox or MS Live. 

6. Make time to process your mail immediately. Separate documents from envelopes.

7. Recycle envelopes as soon as you open them.

8. Remove any shredding piles yourself or take to locations that do this for you.

9. Bookmark it: Try Delicious, Diigo. Save your notes and lists in Evernote, or others like them.

10. Save pictures in Google’s Picasa, or Yahoo’s Flickr. Why not create a book of all your favorites to make as a keepsake.

 

Now that you will have all this unused extra paper and office supplies lying around, you will be able to create more space by donating your excess to charities. Zealous Good is a great way to give when your business only has these kinds of supplies to offer.

These simple tips are an example of a few online services that are not only time savers but are going to help you reduce your carbon footprint in your home.