We could not do the programming and web design work we need to do to support our highly-mobile alternative lifestyle without some computer tools we use every day; I thought I would share them here.
DropBox and Evernote are both very handy things to be using on a daily basis. If you don’t have an Evernote account,
set one up and get used to using it. It’s the future….
Evernote is a place in the cloud to save all your records, documents, pictures, etc., so you can access them on your phone, your tablet, laptop or computer.
Using Evernote, we went from having hundreds of linear feet of files (ten of the 4-drawer legal-sized filing cabinets full of old client projects, tax records, prospect files, old writing projects, research notes and so on, which I mostly kept in 3-ring binders we bought by the case) to having NO paper files other than some operational manuals for our vehicle.
Before we went mobile, we acquired a ScanSnap scanner, which riffs through about 50 pages per minute of scanning (both sides) AND converts it through OCR to indexable text, AND indexes it, and makes it available instantly on Evernote. (We already owned a flatbed scanner, but it was so slow we would likely still be working on the project now, a year and a half later, without our ScanSnap!)
I then spent every spare moment for nearly 3 months carefully going through our files and scanning the information we needed to actually retain, and destroying the unneeded paper on which that information used to reside. I gave all the empty binders to a local private school for their students and faculty to use.
Finally, we have a (99.99%) paperless home and office, despite my wife’s (and my own) sordid, life-long love affair with paper. (Ah, the smell of a freshly opened ream of 8-1/2 x 11… No! Mustn’t go there!)
We both still use paper “bullet journals” to keep track of what needs doing, because we are old-school and I must get my daily fix of actually writing something with my MontBlanc mechanical pencil. But my 40-year old Aceliner stapler (a beautiful old gothic-looking thing) which I brought with us only because it’s been on every desk I’ve occupied since 1976 — goes sadly unused.
(I’ll give some more recommendations in subsequent posts.)
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