I refuse to tolerate it any longer in my life.

This week my wife and I hauled off several small truckloads of clutter to Goodwill (and some to the dump). We’re got more to haul away — but we’ve at least identified it all and we know what we’re doing about the clutter conundrum.

Next on my clutter-blusting list: paper.

Man, do I have a lot of paper. And I have found the solution (I think). If you haven’t read Ken Silver’s post on the Paperless Office, go read it now.

In his article, Ken says:

Here’s what I do each day to win the paper war:

When paper of any kind…a magazine article I clip, an invoice, notice or bill… gets to my desk, I run it through the ScanSnap which is permanently on.

The item shows up on Windows Explorer in the supplied Adobe Acrobat 6.0 program as an untitled PDF file. I name it immediately in a COMPANY NAME – DOCUMENT NAME – ITEM – DATE format and drag it to the appropriate folder.

I have only 2 folders for all my files, marked BUSINESS and PERSONAL. The Business folder has sub-folders, each labeled as a financial year… 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 etc. There is one other sub folder which I’ve labeled PROJECTS.

Since my scanned files are shown in alphabetical order in Explorer – and that’s the way I retrieve them too – there’s no need to get any more complicated than that.

I ordered my Scansnap today and it should arrive tomorrow. I’ll have more to say about this soon — but for now check out Ken’s article. If you’ve had any experience with “going paperless”, let me know by posting your comments below.