Back in November, I held a four-week online class for a group of awesome DocumentSnap readers who wanted to take action on going paperless. I called it the Paperless Action Plan.

The class went really well, and the feedback from that first course was extremely helpful.

I’m happy to announce that I am re-opening the even-better-than-before Paperless Action Plan today.

This project is a four-module class over nine weeks that is focused specifically on helping you create an end-to-end, customized action plan for going paperless, as well as helping you sort out what you need to do to put your plan into action.

Learn more or register here.

This launch is strictly limited to two weeks only (aka, until February 21). After that, the registration will be closed.

What It Is

Great question. The Paperless Action Plan has four action-focused lessons over nine weeks. Why nine weeks? On the weeks between modules I have “office hours” to answer any questions that you may have, and we take a catch-up week.

I know that everyone learns differently, so each week we will have:

• A live teleclass with Q&A time where I cover the material.
• Downloadable PDFs with the important takeaways.
• Recorded MP3 files so you can listen (or re-listen) to the lessons at your convenience.
• Worksheets and handouts so you can put the lessons into action.

There is also a special members-only forum where you can ask me and the other class members questions about your situation, so you can get the best strategy.

At the end of the class, you will have everything you need to put together your own paperless action plan, and know exactly what to do to accomplish it.

Who it Is For

You want to go paperless, but are not sure where to start. You are tired of looking all over the Internet for bits and pieces of information and would like to just have everything consolidated in one place. You need more help than just organizing your documents. You’ve read and read, but haven’t done much to get going.

How do you keep the physical paper in your life under control? How do you organize and keep everything safe? How do you stay on track? How do you convince the people around you that you’re not crazy for doing this?

Who It Is Not For

The Paperless Action Plan won’t review every single scanner, software, and backup option. We will share our experiences and recommendations, but if you are looking for an indepth tutorial on every piece of hardware and software out there, it is probably not what you want.

It is also not for you if you just want to buy it, download the materials, and not do anything with it. No guide or piece of software is going to “go paperless” for you. At the end of the day, you have to actually do the stuff outlined. If you are not at the place to be able to do that yet (and I understand if you are not), this may not be for you.

That’s it! Hopefully speak to you soon on the first call.

Here’s the link again if you are interested in learning more.

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Related posts:

1. Take Action With The Paperless Action Plan
2. Make Your Backup Plan Bulletproof

One such reader is Clare Kumar from Streamlife. Clare is a Professional Organizer, which in itself isn’t too unusual for DocumentSnap readers, but she is also the Organizing Expert for the Marilyn Denis Show, a lifestyle and talk show up here in Canada[1].

Recently Clare was on the show talking about paper organization. Although I go on and on about paperless stuff here on the site, having your physical paper organized can be just as important. Your paperless workflow will go much more smoothly if your paper is in control.

She has some good tips for paper workflow, and some interesting products in her shopping guide. In particular, the Swingline Stack & Shred Shredder looks pretty cool. Apparently it comes in a 60 sheet version too.

To watch Clare’s segment, click here to watch the video.

Any tips or great products you have for controlling physical paper?

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1. 10 Tips For Achieving Paper Zen
2. How To Handle Back To School Paper
3. Delaware Law Blog Has Great Paperless Tips

I picked up a Kindle 4 a few months ago, and while it has been fantastic for reading books, I wanted to see how it does with PDFs.

I’ll be using this Kindle in the examples below, but I believe the workflow is similar for most recent E Ink Kindles.

But First, A Note

I don’t want to give the impression that the E Ink Kindle is as good as, say, an iPad. For starters, there is only 1.25 GB available for user content. Additionally, the screen is not color[1], so your PDFs are not going to look as nice as on an iPad.

There are no “apps” in the modern sense of the word, so you are limited to the Kindle’s built-in ability to display PDFs, and finally, the screen is only 6", so you may need to do some zooming if you want to read a PDF closely.

Having said all that, PDF display works surprisingly well on the 6" E Ink Kindle 4, and the documents are very readable. The device is extremely light, and many people carry the Kindle with them anyways. Why not use it for going paperless?

There are two main ways to get your PDFs on the device:

1. Connect via USB
2. Send via Email

Copy PDFs To Kindle Via USB

The Kindle comes with a USB cable that is used for charging, but it can also be used to copy content over to the device. When I plug the Kindle into my computer, it mounts it as a drive[2].

The magic happens in the documents folder. In the Finder, take a PDF and drag it to that folder.

When you eject the Kindle from your computer, you should now see the PDF on the device.

You can view the PDF like any normal Kindle book, and it will display on the screen.

I am not sure if you can tell in this screenshot, but this PDF looks a bit faint on the Kindle screen. I chose that on purpose, and we’ll get into that in a bit.

Email PDFs To Kindle

Amazon has a great service whereby you can email documents to your Kindle’s email address (did you know it had one?), and the documents will appear on your device.

Find Your Kindle’s Email Address

The first thing you want to do is find your Kindle’s address. To do that, from the home screen, hit the Menu button, then choose Settings, then hit the next page button on the side.

You’ll see your Send-to-Kindle email address.

Note: Before you go crazy sending documents to yourself, you need to be careful of Amazon’s charges.

If you have a 3G Kindle and download your PDFs to your device over 3G, you will want to see Amazon’s Personal Document Fees. If you download over wi-fi, it is free.

To be safe, you will want to use the @free.kindle.com address. Let’s say your Kindle’s address is daniel_sedin@kindle.com. If you send your documents to daniel_sedin@free.kindle.com, it will only transfer them if you are connected to wi-fi, and you don’t have to worry about getting nailed with fees.

Make Sure You Are An Approved Sender

If your email address that you will send documents to is the same as your Amazon account, you can skip this step. If you are like me and have different addresses, you need to add your address as an approved Sender.

• Go to Amazon.com
• Click on Your Account at the top
• Click on Manage Your Kindle under Digital Content
• Click on Personal Document Settings on the left
• Add yourself under Approved Personal Document E-mail List

Email Your Documents To Your Kindle

You can either attach PDFs directly to an email, or zip up a group of them and attach the zip file.

Don’t forget, if you are on 3G, make sure to send to your @free.kindle.com account to avoid nasty bills.

When you are connected to wi-fi, your document will appear on your Kindle ready to view.

If you have a long PDF that you want to read, you may find it nicer to have Amazon convert the PDF into the Kindle’s native format. Then it will be just like reading a normal Kindle book.

To do that, when you email the PDF in, put the word convert in the subject line. Amazon’s servers will then convert it to Kindle format before sending it to your device.

For more than you could possibly want to know about getting personal content onto your Kindle, check out Amazon’s help page.

Improving Reading

When you view a PDF on screen, it may be too faint or small to read. Hit the Menu button on the Kindle and then choose Zoom & Contrast. You can adjust the contrast to make the text darker, and adjust the zoom so that you can read it more comfortably.

Organize PDFs

The Kindle doesn’t have the concept of folders, but it does have Collections.

Amazon does a much more thorough job of going through this than I could, so check out their Organizing Your Kindle Content help page.

Searching

If your PDF is searchable, searching within the PDF does work.[3] Unfortunately, it does not appear that PDF files are included in the system-wide Kindle search. Too bad.

Conclusion

All-in-all, I was pleasantly surprised by my 6" Kindle’s ability as a PDF reader. I wouldn’t want to give up my iPad for it, but if I didn’t have one, it is a nice alternative. For $79 USD[4], it is pretty hard to beat.

Do you use your Kindle or other e-reader to store and read PDFs? Any tricks or workflows that I have missed? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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Related posts:

1. Borrow Library Books On Your Kindle
2. Amazon Kindle DX Goes International
3. Amazon Kindle Finally Goes International

OK, so you are probably in trouble if you want to buy someone something by now. It’s time to resort to gift cards.

Perhaps “resort” is not the best word, because some people (myself included) actually prefer to get gift cards. To me, it is a complete win-win.

If you’re in the United States or country with Amazon.com, a good choice is an Amazon gift certificate.

That way, they have a bunch of stuff to choose from (see many of the previous items in the 12 Days series), and you are saved the stress.

Click here to check out Amazon’s gift card options

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There are some people who are more in the “holiday card” category than the “buy a present” category. We can be honest about that, right?

Being a paperless person, this can present a bit of a problem. You may not want to mail a paper card, but you remember what a complete disaster old-school electronic cards were. The ads! The pop-ups! The terribly-animated falling snow! The horrible music!

What I usually do is use Paperless Post, which actually has classy e-cards. If you want to be paperless and not scare or insult your recipients, it is worth checking out.

Click here to check out Paperless Post

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Following my series on interesting scanning projects, I came across this interesting post from AIIM Blogger Daniel O’Leary: A scanning project worthy of a ‘Band of Brothers’.

He has been going through and digitizing the letters and photos from his grandfather, a WWII veteran.

People know me as someone who lives in a paperless office, and enjoys a paperless lifestyle, in fact I don’t own a printer. So you might be asking, why I have held onto this particular paper. My grandfather’s letters from the war tell a profound story. He was part of the invasion of France, liberated Paris, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, freed Belgium, and smashed the Eagle’s Nest. That would make a great movie, right? Correct, and HBO turned his division’s story into ‘Band of Brothers’. I had heard some of this growing up, but now digging into his letters; it became totally real and personal for me.

Like him, I would have been pretty nervous the first time I fed one of those letters into the document feeder of the scanner, but it looks like the Canon DR-C125 that he used was up to the job.

If you read the post, don’t miss the comments on the bottom, where they go into an interesting discussion of preserving documents vs. just making them accessible. Just because you digitize something doesn’t mean you don’t need to take steps to preserve the paper, too.

Have you done any projects preserving your family history? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

(Photo by Daniel O’Leary)

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When tablet computers were first announced, many people were wondering what on earth they’d be used for.

It turns out, one really great use case is to read your paperless documents, and to be able to bring them up as-needed.

The iPad is the 8,000 pound gorilla in the space, but it is not the only option:

iPad 2

• Who is it for?: People who want an easy to use tablet with lots of apps.
• Operating System: Apple iOS.
• Size: 9.5“ x 7.31” x .34"
• Weight: 1.33 pounds
• Where can I buy it?
  Amazon

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

• Who is it for?: People who want more expandability than the iPad offers.
• Operating System: Android Honeycomb 3.1
• Size: 10.1“ x 6.9” x .34"
• Weight: 1.25 pounds
• Where can I buy it?
  Amazon

ASUS Eee Pad Transformer

• Who is it for?: People who want more expandability than the iPad offers, and a keyboard dock.
• Operating System: Android Honeycomb 3.2
• Size: 10.67“ x 6.97” x .51"
• Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Where can I buy it?
  Amazon

Kindle Fire

• Who is it for?: People who want an integrated Amazon experience.
• Operating System: Android Honeycomb 3.2
• Size: 7.5“ x 4.7” x 0.45"
• Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Where can I buy it?
  Amazon

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2. Mobile Scanners – 12 Days Of Paperless Gifts
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I came across this great research trip report by Linda McCauley: The Paperless Research Trip Was Succesful. It’s a great writeup of the methods and tools that she used to research family records.

I started last Monday morning in the Probate Clerk’s Office in the Whitfield County, Georgia courthouse with my Android Tablet, Wand Scanner and Android Phone (used to take the photo below). Over three days, I also researched at the Whitfield-Murray Historical Society and the Murray County courthouse. I did not print one piece of paper. I did not write a word on a piece of paper. I copied everything with either the wand scanner or an app on my phone and typed all notes into Evernote on the tablet.

It may surprise you since I have a reputation for being a bit of an Apple fanboi, but one thing I like about this post, other than the paperlessosity, is that all this is done without a single piece of Apple technology. It’s a nice reminder that yes, you can actually get stuff done with Android in general and Android tablets specifically.

Are you into genealogy? Any tricks for doing research without using paper? Let’s hear it in the comments.

(Photo by Linda McCauley)

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1. Use Microsoft OneNote For Paperless Genealogy

When you make a move like that, you quickly learn to maximize space as much as possible. Since making the move, I’ve always been interested in how others deal with small spaces.[2]

To that end, this forum thread on Unclutterer caught my attention. It is all about being moved from an office to a small cubicle. Similar to our house move, having to move to a smaller workspace can be quite a disruption, especially when it has to be done in a hurry.

There are a number of great tips in the thread, but I like this one from herisff:

Cut down the office supplies in your area, and only keep the records you must in your cubicle. I’m a big believer in using a space for awhile before purchasing organizers, so I suggest making do for a few days with what you have.

Any time you are looking to make a large change, I find that it can help to shape your workflow to how you actually do things, rather than trying to force yourself to do something that doesn’t fit.

Sort of like the (possibly apocryphal) stories of universities adding sidewalks after they see where students walk.

Have you ever had to go through a space downsizing? How did it go?

(Photo by ajleon)

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1. My Paperless Office Workspace
2. Inc. Magazine On How To Organize Your Workspace And Go Paperless
3. Making Acrobat OCR’ed PDFs Smaller With Formatted Text & Graphics

There are, of course, security considerations when doing this. One more the more insightful articles I have read on this topic was written on The Economist’s Babbage blog this Spring after Dropbox’s well-publicized security woes.

The article is called Keys to the cloud castle, and it is a great overview of the security implications of keeping your sensitive information in the cloud, some options that you have, and and a good plain-English description of the issues.

Even better, it stresses the need for users to be educated on the topic.

What the revelations, complaints, accusations and responses have demonstrated is the need for better education about which set of encryption and security choices are most appropriate for what sort of data. The average user simply does not know what he is letting himself in for, or how to gauge the risks involved.

If you want to be educated (and I recommend that you do), I recommend checking out the article.

(Photo by tristanf)

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2. ScanDrop Updates Cloud Scanning For Windows And Mac
3. Reader Story: Fifteen Years Of Paper To The Cloud