Cutting down the paper mountain

Four days ago I moved house. I’m sitting at my laptop writing this in a cave of unpacked boxes. You’ve probably found yourself in a similar place at least once in your life.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the shift was the sheer volume of paper we needed to move between houses. Despite living in a digital age, paper accounted for a third of the total weight moved.

We’ll put books and magazines – probably the largest part – to one side for the moment and concentrate on other forms of paper.

Home business is paper-centric

I run a home business and my wife also has a business. So there’s plenty of paperwork. We have three full two-drawer filing cabinets of business documents. At least the same amount again stored away in boxes.

We’re journalists, so we keep archive copies of newspapers, magazines etc we have written for in the past – about two more filing cabinets-worth. Reference material would fill another cabinet.

There’s probably another cabinet of non-work related paper. Add in our children’s old schoolbooks and their paper junk. All-in-all our total paper collection is enough to fill a large room. Around 6 full-sized filing cabinets.

Admittedly we’re at the high-end of the scale, but our paper hoard is not abnormal.

Clearly I’m going to need to get rid of as much as this as possible. Ideally we’d have no paper, but that’s unrealistic. I’m aiming to cut things to just two two-drawer filing cabinets and my scanner is my friend.

Before starting on the task, it’s worth reminding myself paper is:

• Awkward to move
• Heavy
• Bulky
• Relatively fragile
• Many documents are badly faded or torn
• Combustible
• Prone to mould (and therefore vaguely unhealthy)
• Difficult to search.

Scanning started years ago

We knew the move was coming months ago, so I started scanning documents well in advance. Six months later I estimate I turned around 10 percent of the total pile into digital documents. At this rate it could take four years to reach my target. I’ll be writing more about these experiences in the future.

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