Paper, paper, everywhere paper

I remember years ago when someone predicted that with the advent of the Internet, paper would become obsolete. I wish my desk and the boxes of credit card statements, bank statements, utility bills, etc. would have gotten that message.

So, in the past few weeks I have gone about de-papering my life. 

I found this little desktop scanner that I have totally fallen in love with: ScanSnap by Fujitsu. This little scanner doesn't take up a lot of room and it's amazing. You load in several pieces of paper and hit the scan button and pretty quickly you have a PDF on your computer. It even comes with the Adobe Acrobat software, a $300 value in itself.

So for several weeks I have scanned in my life and reduced it to one single CD data disc. I've now moved on to scanning in all those recipes I've printed out or written out over the years. Truth be told I should have just gotten one of those recipe software organization programs but the thought of actually entering in all that information... scanning is just so much easier.

My favorite part? It's the easy search on the computer for the "piece of paper" I was looking for and not having to sift through piles in order to find it.

Check out the ScanSnap or other products like it (I've heard that NeatReceipts is a pretty good alternative) and go paperless. It's a very freeing feeling.