Tuesday was my street's paper recycling day.

We recently moved house so we left a huge amount of paper on the kerb.

Among the pile were nine supermarket carrier bags* of paper from my home office. I held another couple of bags back because they held sensitive material which needed shredding.

Nine carrier bags is a lot of paper. It certainly weighed a lot.

At a guess I'd say it amounts to entire file cabinet drawer. And yet, recycling that pile has barely made any practical difference to the space in my home office. It is as if, where paper is concerned, this room uses the same technology as Dr Who's Tardis.

Clearly the whole paperless journalist project needs to move up a gear.

*Around these parts we are asked to put recycled paper in plastic bags.

An annoying aspect of moving home was the sheer volume of paper we moved between houses. Despite living in a digital age, paper was a third of the total weight moved.

We'll put books and magazines – probably the largest part – to one side and concentrate on other paper. It's time to become a paperless journalist.

Home business is paper-centric

I run a home business and my wife also has a business. We have plenty of paper. Our three two-drawer filing cabinets are full of business documents. We store at least the same amount in boxes.

We're journalists, so we keep archive copies of newspapers, magazines etc we have written for in the past – about two filing cabinets. Reference material fills another cabinet.

There's another cabinet of non-work related paper. Add in our children's old schoolbooks and their paper junk.

All-in-all our paper collection would fill a 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 need to get rid of as much paper as possible. Ideally we'd have no paper, we'd be paperless. But that's unrealistic.

I'm aiming to cut the paper mountain to just two two-drawer filing cabinets and my scanner is my friend.

Before starting, it's worth remembering paper is:

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

Move to paperless started years before

We knew the move was coming, so I started scanning documents well in advance. Six months later I estimate I turned around 10 percent of the total paper pile into digital documents. At this rate it could take four years to reach my paperless target.