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002: Going paperless
1.2k Plays6 years ago
This episode talks about the second key foundation of an efficient life admin system: going paperless.
The hosts, Mia and Dinah, describe the five steps they went through to go paperless:
- Setting up a dedicated admin email address and cloud storage account for life admin.
- Setting up a password manager to remember and protect online accounts.
- Opting out of paper billing, statements and notifications.
- Throwing out existing paper they no longer needed.
- Scanning the remaining papers and uploading them to the cloud storage drive.
They talk about the criteria they used to decide what to keep, including tax records.
The benefits of going paperless include:
- reducing clutter
- minimising the need and effort to do filing or recycling
- providing remote access to key documents to allow you to share information or do life admin tasks whenever are wherever you like
- reducing paper consumption to support environmental sustainability.
LIFE ADMIN HIGH OF THE WEEK
- Dinah talks about the joy of visiting the orthodontist and scanning and filing the contract in Google Drive while still at the office, eliminating the need to bring more paper into her home.
- Mia talks about the peace of mind of removing of the paper clutter from her home and the extra space and focus that emerged.
LIFE ADMIN LOW OF THE WEEK
Dinah talks about the firehose of paper that's still coming into her house relating to her children’s school and extracurricular activities.
POWER TOOL
Dinah talks about how Brian Tracy's book Eat That Frog directs readers to focus on critical tasks and not get bogged down in the less important, quicker tasks.
RESOURCES
- Tidying expert Marie Kondo:
- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - Book
- Tidy up your home: The KonMari Method - Online Training Course
- Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast episode 172: Toss Unnecessary Papers
- Brian Tracy's book on procrastinating and prioritising: Eat That Frog
SHARE
Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook page to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.
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Transcript
Introduction to Life Admin Life Hacks
00:00:00
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony. I'm Diana Roe Roberts, a commercial and finance executive. And I'm Mia Northrop, a user experience designer, researcher and writer.
Why Go Paperless?
00:00:21
Speaker
This episode will talk about one of the foundations to establishing a great life admin system, going paperless.
00:00:33
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. This is the year 2018. The right technology was invented years ago to manage paperwork digitally. But when we conducted our survey, filing was the one thing that was almost universally out of control. People are overwhelmed by floods of paper oozing from their desks and drawers, hindering them from becoming more productive. And until recently, I was one of them. Me
Steps to Paperless Efficiency
00:01:02
Speaker
too.
00:01:03
Speaker
Going paperless involves five different steps. First, you need to set up an email address and cloud storage such as Google Drive or Dropbox that's dedicated to admin. Then you need to set up a password manager to manage online accounts from various organizations.
00:01:19
Speaker
Next, you need to opt out of paper for billing statements and messages that you might get from these organisations that send you stuff in the post. You want them to send all of this stuff to your admin email address instead and sometimes you can do this online or you may require a phone call. So these first steps stop new paper entering your home.
00:01:42
Speaker
Once you've stopped new paper entering your house, then you need to get to deal with the existing paper. So you need to go through all of your existing filing cabinets, folders, and any other document storage and destroy or shred anything you don't need. And the rest of the documents, you need to scan and upload them to your cloud storage.
00:02:02
Speaker
So this might feel like an overwhelming number of steps, but when Diana and I approached this, we did it over multiple sessions, multiple days. It's not the kind of thing you can do in one hit. Yeah, ditching the paperwork and files and that going completely paperless. It's quite an investment in time, but wow, the benefits are huge. So Mia, I know you've started and stopped going paperless, but over the last week, it sounds like you've really cracked it. So how did you go about the process?
00:02:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think it took me about a month all up. So I
Mia's Paperless Journey
00:02:36
Speaker
started by setting up an email address and I did on Google set up a new Gmail address and shared the password with my husband. So we both have access to this new email or Google account.
00:02:47
Speaker
And I made the email, I put in the email background, a nice family photo from a holiday because this space is going to be used for administration. It's going to be used for me to go in and check bills and statements. It's going to be a boring little place. So I thought it would be nice to have a nice fun family holiday photo as the background. I'm always thinking about it from a design perspective. So I clearly have done nothing to my admin email address.
00:03:17
Speaker
A word to note there, when you're setting up Gmail email addresses, you can't actually use an email address with admin in the name. Obviously they've got some policy about this. So I recommend that you use a name that doesn't pertain to your location, like where you live in case you move house. You want to pick something evergreen.
00:03:38
Speaker
Then I trialed a password manager called Keeper. And Keeper you can use on my Mac and on my iPhone. There's a free trial where you set it up as a browser extension and it stores passwords. It stores credit card info and form filling data. And we're going to do a deep dive on password managers, but Keeper
00:04:02
Speaker
was a good fit for me. There's a few different ones out there. And then I had set up Google Drive folders, and I basically used the same kinds of names for these folders as I had for my hanging folders in my filing cabinet. So there were ones for communications and entertainment, with some folders for internet, pay TV, phone. I had folders for each kid, for me, my partner. And then I had folders for insurance, for tax, and for all the different types of utilities.
00:04:31
Speaker
So we also decided to use Google Drive and Gmail. And I guess I made that decision when I decided to use the Google Calendar because they all work so well together. And I did speak to a few super organized and tech savvy people that have gone paperless. And
Decluttering with Marie Kondo's Tips
00:04:47
Speaker
some of them do use Evernote. So that's one that's also worth exploring.
00:04:51
Speaker
Because I think it makes it easier to find documents. But I think because our documents aren't that complex, Google Drive is really enough for us. Yeah. And lots of people use Dropbox, especially at work. So if you're very familiar with Dropbox, that might be a solution for you as well. Yeah. I also spoke to some IT friends about security because I think one of the concerns people have about the idea of going paperless
00:05:17
Speaker
is because of this idea, you know, the worry about identity theft. You know, the general consensus is that Google drive is pretty secure, but I did make a decision to have a more secure vault. And I'm using that as part of my password manager. But as Mia said, we'll talk about that in another episode. So the next stage for me was to basically go through all of my folders and go through the documents. How did you approach that stage?
00:05:46
Speaker
Well, before I even got started, I actually did a Marie Kondo online training course and I was decluttering my whole house, but there was a whole section on, on paper. And so I guess I, I established some key takeaways from that, which really informed how I went about the process. And for people who don't know who Marie Kondo is, do you want to give a little bit of background there? Well, you could do that.
00:06:12
Speaker
So Marie Kondo wrote a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tiding Up, and another book called Spark Joy, all about decluttering. She's got a website called KonMari.com, and she's been this global phenomenon where people have read the book. They have had these life-changing epiphanies where they've decluttered their homes, and she goes into minute detail about how to tackle every single item in your home, how to decide whether you should be keeping it or getting rid of it.
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, I found her a little bit too extreme for me, but I did get some really good tips. So her default is that all paper should be discarded.
00:06:52
Speaker
And so I have probably adopted a 90% principle in respect to that. But she did suggest one thing that was really good, which is having a pending folder. And so as I was setting up my system, I created one both in my Gmail and in my Google drive for anything that I have read, but I can't action it quickly. And so it's really clear things that I need to do either to file or action are sitting in my two pending folders.
00:07:23
Speaker
She also talks a bit about the idea of that all statements should be discarded because you can look at just about everything online now. And I guess I have tried to adopt that principle wherever I feel like I don't need to access the documents regularly. So that's been a good one.
00:07:42
Speaker
But one other great idea
Digital File Organization Strategies
00:07:43
Speaker
I did get was she talked about recipes and I've got lots of recipes on pieces of paper floating around that I've either cut out of magazines or that I've kept from somewhere else. And so I set up a folder within my Google drive to scan and save all those recipes. And it's so much easier now to find the ones that I want.
00:08:05
Speaker
This is the thing with going through the paper. I kind of forgot that I have a recipe folder tucked away somewhere with things cut out and ripped out of magazines and even handwritten recipes from friends and family that I never consult.
00:08:21
Speaker
I always just get my phone out of the iPad and look up something online. It's very rare that I go to that folder. I can probably very easily ditch the whole thing. And there might be a couple of handwritten recipes from my grandparents and things I'd hang on to, not because I need to consult them, but just because I want them as like, you know, memorabilia.
00:08:41
Speaker
Yeah. And Marie Kondo also says to get rid of all of your manuals. So this is kind of a, you know, felt like a bit of a security blanket, but I guess as I was going through them, I realized that most of them I've never, ever looked at again. Absolutely.
00:08:58
Speaker
I did actually get rid of most of them, but what I did do was I just took a quick picture of the front of each of them so that it was really easy for me to find the model number, so much easier to Google for the manual going forward.
00:09:13
Speaker
Yeah. I just realized now that I also have a warranty folder that has escaped my attention. This is a big task. It is deep clutter as Gretchen Rubin would call it. So Gretchen Rubin has the happier podcast and she gives some criteria about how you can decide which documents you should chuck out. So she says, you should ask yourself, do you actually need this piece of paper or receipt? What specific use does it have? Have you ever used it?
00:09:40
Speaker
How easy would it be to replace if you needed it? Will the document or the information quickly become outdated? And she gives examples like shopping prices for items or travel info, restaurant reviews that by the time you want to go there might not be so relevant.
00:09:58
Speaker
She says to ask yourself, does the internet mean that it's no longer necessary? Or what's the consequence of not having it if you do need it? Was it once necessary, but now related to a part of your life that's over? And I do know that in my warranty folder, for example, I have warranties for things like cots and baby monitors that I haven't used for so many years. You certainly don't have a baby anymore, Mia. Goodness. So yeah, so there's some criteria that you can use to decide whether you should toss these papers.
00:10:30
Speaker
So when I was setting up my system, I also spent a bit of time really planning out the folder structure of Google Drive, and I decided really to keep the same folder structure as I had in my previous leverage files. So that makes it really easy for us to be able to find things, but obviously the only two folders I've added were a pending folder and a recipes folder, as I talked about before.
00:10:58
Speaker
I've also made that pending folder my default folder for my scanner. So as soon as I scan something through my scanner, it automatically appears in that pending folder. I'm loving this scanner. I can't believe the functionality that's available. I know. And so then it's really easy for me to, you know, when I'm sitting somewhere on my phone, I can quickly move things from that pending folder into the right folder.
00:11:23
Speaker
All right. Okay. So with the papers that I kept that I realized were important or things I needed to protect, I scanned them with the notes app on my iPhone. So this is, I don't know when this functionality became available, but you can scan a document in notes and it saves it as a PDF. And because I also have the Google drive app on my phone now,
00:11:47
Speaker
I could scan that PDF and save it directly into the Google Drive folder and rename it so I could scan a phone bill, go to Google Drive, save it in my phone bill under utilities and put, you know, March 2018 or whatever so that it was identifiable. I also made a decision about how to try and save all my
Benefits of Direct Debit
00:12:10
Speaker
file names with the same sort of file naming convention. So putting the year first and then the month. So it makes it much easier to sort of sort documents and find the one if I am actually looking for something. Yeah, that's a good idea. I wish you'd taught me that before Dinah. Oh, I should write all this down. Put in a book.
00:12:32
Speaker
Okay, papers that aren't convenient to save as hard copy. For example, I found my cat's immunization record book. So things that, you know, couldn't scan or I still needed hard copy access to. So for example, I have a
00:12:49
Speaker
a piece of paper that's got all the wifi passwords and stuff for when babysitters come over. I just kept those in the hanging files. But everything else I recycled or shredded. I borrowed a shredder from a neighbor in our local Facebook good karma network. I borrowed the shredder. The kids and I had a ball shredding and recycling just so much paper. I couldn't fathom how much paper we found.
00:13:15
Speaker
Yeah, I took it one section at a time. I went through my leverage folders, made a decision on how much to keep and then did the same, lots of shredding and quite a bit of scanning too. But I did that sort of piece by piece, section by section so that it didn't feel overwhelming. One of the things I decided to do at the same time was
00:13:40
Speaker
When I was going through my followers, when I hit my gas utility bills, I rang up and I switched to direct debit for those bills and to get email statements and email notifications. In the past, I've actually been really hesitant to commit to direct debit because I just felt like I wanted the extra control.
00:14:01
Speaker
Thinking about it clearly, it was quite irrational for me to feel like I would be losing control if I moved to direct debit because honestly, I seldom have any issues with my bills. I can't actually remember the last time I felt like there was an anomaly or an issue with the bill. So,
00:14:17
Speaker
While it's possible for there to be errors, it's really not probable. And in 10 years of service from my gas and utility provider, or however long it's been, there's never been an issue. So even if there was an issue, there's always recourse through customer service.
00:14:34
Speaker
So the reduction in the effort fully outweighs a potential concern. I can still scan the expenses as they come through the credit card statement. I can still scan the bills as they get emailed through. And with some providers, you can actually specify the date of withdrawal that you want the billing cycle to run on. But now I've got no need to micromanage getting the paper.
00:14:58
Speaker
getting the envelope, having that wasted paper from the environment. I don't have to file it. I don't have to deal with the clutter. I don't have to recycle the paper afterwards. I don't have the actual task of paying the bill. So this system far outweighs any concerns. I've actually genuinely saved myself time, potentially saving money because I'm never missing a payment I'm never going to get.
00:15:20
Speaker
fees or penalties for missing a payment. And I do actually have peace of mind. I feel like I have enough control and I have enough confidence in the billing systems of these organizations.
Secure Document Storage
00:15:30
Speaker
Oh, that's great, Mia. I think one of the things I also decided to do was, you know, where there's particular things that are kind of low value that I don't really need to keep. I just decided that I'm no longer going to file them. So for example, we have toll statements from our use of the CityLink tolls here in Melbourne. So in that case, I just made sure I've got access to the password so that I can easily access them if I ever need to.
00:15:56
Speaker
But to be honest, the email comes in and I just delete it. I don't even I have a quick glance and it's gone. It's one less thing for me to worry about filing. So what about tax? I know a lot of people think, OK, what about paperless? But there are some records that you do actually need to keep hard copies of for compliance purposes. Yeah. So for any of those things that I had wanted to keep,
00:16:20
Speaker
Cause you need to keep your tax records in Australia for five years. The tax office are very clear that you're allowed to keep those electronically. So you don't need to keep them in paper format. So for anything that I felt I needed to keep for tax purposes, I just scanned it all into one big file and, and upload it into my cloud storage. And so, you know, it really doesn't, it doesn't have to make things more complicated. Well, that's excellent.
00:16:48
Speaker
Okay, so you've kept, you've got documents in your Google Drive, but you mentioned also perhaps another level of security for other reported documents. What else are you using?
00:17:00
Speaker
Yeah, so I've also, as I was going through the filing cabinets, I noticed that we've also got some documents that I do want to keep in hard copy or need to, like passports and birth certificates. You know, my degree from university, I'm not quite ready to go the next step and shred that yet. Oh, I thought you'd be framing that, putting it on a wall. Definitely not.
00:17:24
Speaker
So I went and bought myself a fireproof safe. So an A4 sized fireproof safe that I can put my passport and birth certificates and things like that where I really feel like we need to keep a hard copy.
00:17:41
Speaker
And the benefit of keeping this safe is it's quite limited capacity. So it means that my rule now is that I can only keep paper if it fits into that safe. So it's really given me a limit of how many things I can put in there and you know.
00:17:57
Speaker
you know, if the house did happen to burn down, well, it's, you know, the added benefit is we'll have at least our passports and birth certificates and not have to worry about trying to replace those. Yeah, that's great. I've got my passports and those kinds of irreplaceable documents just in a plastic kind of folder in my filing cabinet, but we should invest in a safe as well. Yep. So Mia, now you've gone paperless. Why do you think it's so important as a foundation of a good life admin system?
00:18:29
Speaker
I think for me, the first thing is that this declutters your home. And I really buy into that idea of outer order in a calm. Now I don't have piles of paper on my desk. There's not piles of paper coming and sitting on my kitchen bench. I don't have these filing cabinets that I open up that are just rammed with doggy things hanging out of them. And I've cleared all this space, all these leverage folders that I don't need to use anymore. So there's just that sense of decluttering.
00:18:55
Speaker
I love the fact that with cloud storage, I could access these documents remotely. So if I'm out and about and someone asks me about anything to do with these kinds of financial questions or details of passports or birth certificates, I could access it right there and then.
00:19:13
Speaker
I really love that remote access too. It means I can even do some of that life admin during my lunch break at work because I've got access to all the information. So last week I even changed our superannuation fund, being able to do it during work at work because I could get all of the necessary details I needed.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, and having that remote access means you can share the documents more easily as well. So you can quickly attach it to an email or you can send the link to someone to the cloud storage file. So for example, we had a painter going to our holiday house. We wanted to get a quote and I just needed to send him the floor plan. And I could just flick it on an email attachment and get it to him. Like in the middle of the phone conversation, his jaw kind of dropped open at that was even possible. So that was really useful.
00:20:04
Speaker
I guess the other aspects for me, there's the whole environmental sustainability thing, just less paper consumption is a good thing for the planet. And having the separate email address is great because it's not cluttering up my personal email account. I'm not gonna lose my billing statements for my credit card, for example, within all of the other emails that I get flooded with. So it's definitely worth doing.
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah, one of the other things in going back to what we talked about in the survey, it just makes the filing task so much more manageable. So you can really do filing as you go by either just taking photos and saving them straight into the right folder in Google Drive or, you know, saving email attachments really quickly.
00:20:52
Speaker
I also really love the clean kitchen bench and the fridge. And here that is that kind of outer order in a calm, whereas before there always seemed to be a big pile of papers on my desk and on the kitchen bench and on the fridge. And now it looks all clean and clear. Delicious.
00:21:12
Speaker
Yeah. And how long did it take you? I know you did jobs pretty well, Bam. Yeah. So I think I spent, um, I did a couple of days of intensive effort and then, um, then small sort of half an hour increments, I guess, to finish it off. So, you know, a big, big bang at the beginning and then a few more sessions.
00:21:34
Speaker
It's one of those things where you're going to dedicate a couple of days or nights and then it's sort of set and forget once you've done that. But I think I had three sessions over the month.
00:21:45
Speaker
for that initial purge where I was going through my folders and just shredding up. And each of those sessions would have been a couple of hours long to shred and scan, plus calling some of the organizations to change my billing. And
Success Stories and Challenges
00:21:57
Speaker
then setting up the Google Drive, that took like, you know, 10 minutes really, and the password manager, again, another 10 minutes. So I gave myself a month. I wanted to give it all done in a month. And now it is, yeah, it is. I feel like it's at the set and forget stage.
00:22:13
Speaker
I do think it's probably something you could do in a category by category or, you know, as each bill came in, for example, you can sort of, you know, pick it off one by one, but there is a benefit in doing it quite intensively in that then you sort of change your mindset about dealing with paper. Yeah. Okay, Diana, so do you have a life admin high of the week for us? Oh, I do. And it actually relates to going paperless.
00:22:40
Speaker
My oldest child has just started orthodontic treatment and so we made the trip to the orthodontist and we had to sign our life away for two years of treatment and so we had to sign up a contract and I really did want to keep that document because it's such a big investment.
00:22:59
Speaker
And they handed me a document and in a beautiful folder and the receptionist, you know, expected me to take it away. And instead what I did was I gave her the folder back. I scanned the contract with my scanning app on my phone and saved that document straight to my Google drive. And I didn't even have to take the paper out of the orthodontist surgery and into my house. So just felt, I felt so superior.
00:23:26
Speaker
She would have taken back the paper and be like, oh, okay, I get stuck with this instead of you. But that's the beauty of this whole system is that the paper doesn't even come into your house. That's great. It was great. The receptionist was quite taken aback and she was a little bit offended that I didn't want to take a beautiful cardboard folder. But, you know, think about the environmental benefits of, you know, we don't need all of those folders and papers. So, yeah, we felt really great.
00:23:51
Speaker
That's it, and that was my life admin hire of the week is just finishing this exercise of going paperless and all the shredding that we did. I reckon we filled half of my recycling bin and our compost bin with shredded paper. We had documents that been languishing in there since like 2007.
00:24:09
Speaker
There were car registration receipts for cars we don't even own anymore. There were all these product disclosure booklets that we've never read and that are always out of date. We had statements for credit cards that we haven't had for 10 years and all these medical records that there's just no point hanging on to a blood test from 2013.
00:24:29
Speaker
So we went down from two rammed filing cabinets and some wire file racks and vanilla files. We're now down to half a filing cabinet and that just feels so much more manageable. So that was definitely a high for me. Sounds great. Did you have a life in Minlo? Was there some incredibly annoying tasks that you had to deal with?
00:24:52
Speaker
I don't know why or if it's just, you know, a rare collision, but I just had like a fire hose of forms and permission slips and tickets to buy and coming in both digitally and on paper forms. And it felt like every time I walked in the house, there was another admin task to do related to the children. And I was really doing stuff.
00:25:15
Speaker
School and extra curricular activities and I guess it's in the sort of lead up to end of year, but I really do wish everyone would just go digital so that I could sort of do them more as I go rather than feel like this avalanche of paperwork hits me as I walk into the house.
00:25:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's like you've built this wall, but that keeps chucking stuff over the double foot wall. In every episode, we're going to look at a power tool or a book review so you can get an idea of the kinds of resources that we're finding useful. Do you have something for us this episode?
Review of 'Eat That Frog' and Task Management
00:25:49
Speaker
Yeah, so I actually read a book called Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy, which is, you know, it's kind of an awkward expression, isn't it?
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, I've always wondered where that expression came from because I hate frogs. I find them disgusting. And whenever someone says, you know, you're just going to eat the frog. I'm like, oh, like wincing on so many levels. But we actually discovered that it's a Mark Twain quote, which actually makes me like it more because I like Mark Twain. Mark Twain once said, if it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.
00:26:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty short book, a really easy read. So, you know, if you're keen to learn more about it. But he really talks about in the book the fact that you'll never be caught up. And I guess that's related to my life admin low of the week. You know, there will never be enough time.
00:26:40
Speaker
And he really says, what you actually need to do is pick the most important task and get it done quickly. And so I think if you're thinking about going paperless, you can always think, oh, actually I'll do it after I have paid these three bills. I'll do it after I've sorted out my filing. You know, you really need to resist the temptation to clear up the small things first and really attack that frog, like, you know, the changing your filing system to make things better in the long run.
00:27:11
Speaker
He also talks about breaking the frog into parts, a bit like what we talked about in terms of picking up things category by category. So if you just spend 15 minutes a day until it's sorted, you really feel so much better and it will make all of the life admin that comes after so much better. Yeah, I think this is one of those lessons in self-awareness where you need to know whether you're the kind of person that needs to chip away slowly at something or you like that big bang
00:27:39
Speaker
what's actually most useful for you and giving yourself some discipline around the fact that even doing small steps, chunking it down is progress. Even if it takes you longer, it is still progress, so you should keep going. Yeah, I mean, he actually quotes in the book, by the yard, it's hard, but inch by inch, it's a cinch, which, you know, it's a bit cheesy and American, but it's really, you know, it's worth thinking about in that way.
00:28:09
Speaker
So that wraps us up for this episode. Remember to
Engaging with the Paperless Community
00:28:12
Speaker
try out our life hack for glowing papers this week. Set up an email address dedicated to admin, set up a password manager to manage online accounts, opt out of paper for billing statements and messages, and then go through your existing filing cabinets and folders and shred and recycle anything you don't need.
00:28:33
Speaker
For those remaining documents, scan them and upload them to Google Drive or Dropbox or some other cloud storage. Please head to the Facebook group and share your thoughts and experiences on this week's topic and feel free to post any questions or episode suggestions for us. We look forward to seeing you there. Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeadminlifehacks.com.
00:29:00
Speaker
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