The
Advantage of Going Paperless
I started thinking quite a
few years ago, about what it means to have a "paperless"
workplace. Quite easily, I not only realized the benefit of
saving time at work, but also how someone's home life could be
improved by some of these ideas.
Technology is in place now
that can dramatically reduce the amount of time and energy that
is needed to deal with life's everyday issues.
The first thing to realize
is that needing to look at things on paper is more of a habit
than a necessity. Think about when you have to print something,
do you really need to? I realized that a lot of the things that I
printed from the computer were just to have that piece of paper
in my hand. What do I do with the paper after I read the page? Is
it saved or forwarded on to someone else? Usually, it went into
the trash, so why not read it on the screen and save the paper?
Once you get into the habit, then it is much easier to review
items and make decisions. Here are some additional tips:
1) To help with viewing
items electronically, increase the size of your monitor, the
average size is now 15" to 17" in size, I would
recommend a minimum of 19" or even 21". Those extra
inches really help your time since you can always fit more on a
page and you can have much larger print on your monitor since
some documents are created with a very small print, web pages as
well.
2) Software that is
specially designed to help convert your paper documents to
electronic ones are invaluable. Several that I use are Adobe
Acrobat, which can be found at www.adobe.com, there is a free viewer available.
The files viewed by the reader have a file extension of PDF.
However, to do any conversion of documents to the Adobe format
you will need the purchase the full-blown version of the program.
This program gives you the ability to create an adobe file just
by printing as you would to a printer. The latest version (4.05)
allows you to save web pages or even an entire web site to an
Adobe file, even keeping the web links intact so you can navigate
inside the Adobe file just as you would in a web browser.
Another program that has
proven very valuabe is the paperport deluxe program from Scansoft
which uses the visioneer scanners, and can use other scanning
sources to organize information. Scansoft is a Xerox subsidiary
and has purchased Caere (Omnipage Pro), Pagis Pro and Omnipage,
so they are definitely trying to get a big
3) How do you pay bills?
Until a few years ago, most of my payments were made by check. A
new feature that many companies are touting is payment
automatically by bank draft. It helps avoid late payments on
credit cards, car payments, mortgages, etc. Since the payment is
made by the company it will be on time and if there are any
delays, they take the responsibility for any extra charges. One
of the major concerns that everyone seems to have is access to
the bank account, if anyone has any actual thefts that have
occured from bank drafting. this way, please let me know, I have
done a lot of inquiry and so far have not received any evidence
that this has occured, even though it is possible to be done.
4) Online banking follows
a lot of the earlier section's ideas. A lot of banks are
eliminating sending back actual checks and just sending the check
images, the online services work the same way. The Gomez service www.gomez.com handles evaluating online banks,
one of the better ones I have found is Centura Bank at www.centura.com.
Anyway, this is a little
of my thoughts. I hope that you found some of this information of
interest.
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