A Paperless Guide to Staying Organized

Are you working from home and feeling somewhat disorganized? Are stacks of paper documents distracting you?

Are you having to rummage through all these printed pieces of paper, possibly exposing you and your fingers to papercuts, just to remember what task you need to accomplish?

Fear not: we have paperless solutions to staying organized that will have you and your workspace feeling organized, relaxed, and in control.

Staying organized while working from home might seem easier said than done, but we assure you it’s possible. Here’s how:

My Personal Struggle With Paper

As someone who recently started working from home, I soon realized that all of the paperwork that I brought home with me from the office was becoming the elephant in my room.

I found myself digging through stacks of papers that soon were completely covering my desk.

I began to worry that I might never get through all of these sheets of paper, that I was disorganized, and struggling to keep up with any changes to projects, all because I couldn’t file my documents properly.

And soon, my work files weren’t the only pieces of paper to clutter my desk. I was also dealing with snail mail, receipts, invoices, tax forms…so much so that the elephant grew even larger (and more daunting) than ever before!

I was even considering buying a bulky, heavy filing cabinet just to give myself some peace of mind. But soon I realized that just storing these physical copies in a cabinet would not help solve my problem.

In fact, it was simply a way to clear my desk, but not a solution to my problem with paper. Then I had an epiphany: why not simply digitize these documents for safekeeping?

How To Digitize Your Documents

Going paperless isn’t only helpful for your sanity and organizational skills. It’s also helpful to the environment.

The most important step to clearing your desk and going paperless is to digitize your documents. Easier said than done right? WRONG!

To solve my problems with paper, I looked for the easiest solution. Luckily for me, I was able to find a software that could handle not only my need to go paperless, but one that could also help organize my files in ways my desk never could.

This is why I chose to use Soda PDF, my personal preference as the ultimate tool for going paperless.

There are many ways to digitize documents. Depending on how you want to organize your paperwork (and your well-being), there’s a paperless solution that you should be using.

Here are a few tools that, when used in conjunction with Soda PDF, will help you in your quest to go paperless:

Use Your Camera Phone

We all take pictures, whether to capture stunning sunsets or to add funny moments to our ever-evolving Instagram stories. Or maybe you are like me and you’re involved in a group chat that’s all about showing off how cute your cat can be.

Remember that clutter on your desk? Why not simplify your life by clearing your desk from those stacks of documents and go paperless at the same time: by snapping individual shots of each document!

By using the camera on your mobile phone, you can easily take pictures of your paperwork. Not only did you just transform and digitize your document, you also just reduced your dependence of having that piece of paper on your desk for reference.

We are more accustomed to reading information on our phones than in books, this is just one of the effects of the digital revolution. And part of what makes the digital revolution so great for the environment is the fact that we can save trees by significantly reducing the need for paper.

Now, taking pictures of your documents is just the first step in going entirely paperless. You’ll likely want to edit those documents too, which is why snapping pictures is only the first step.

Get Yourself a Soda PDF Account

Once you’ve taken all of those pictures and cleared your desk of those paper documents, you are likely feeling more relaxed and organized.

But our goal was not to simply just to clear our desks of the clutter, it was to find a paperless guide to getting organized. And having pictures of those documents is great, but reading them will provide to be difficult.

Rather than try to zoom in on your document and read each sentence or paragraph in pieces, try using a PDF reader instead, whether online or via desktop.

Soda PDF is not only a PDF reader and viewer, our software can also help you edit, create, convert, merge (more on that below), and more. Plus, when you create an account with Soda PDF, you’ll get 14-days of free access to these features.

Hence why I decided to rid myself of the stress that a stack of papers can provide and decided to find a paperless solution to give myself, and my organization quite frankly, some peace of mind.

Creating your Soda PDF account can help you to then access the feature you will want to use the most now that you’ve taken so many pictures of that big stack of documents…

Merge Your Documents

Now that your phone gallery is filled with pages of documents, you’re probably wondering how you can combine these back together again. After all, that’s why you printed these pages in the first place: to keep the pages intact.

Merging documents is highly important in getting organized. Consider this process the stapling of your pages.

Using a merge tool isn’t just useful for all of those images you’ve snapped, but also for the clutter that may appear on your desktop or computer folders.

How many versions of project documentation do you have? Are there various file formats that your team sent you that are all relevant? Merge them together for safekeeping but also to ensure that all the information you and your team needs can be found in one centralized document.

Soda PDF’s Merge tool enables you to combine various file formats, such as Microsoft Office files like Word, PowerPoint and Excel, into one single PDF.

I personally love this feature. There I was, scouring through various documents and thinking that there was absolutely no way I could merge these together, that is, unless I used a stapler.

But with Soda PDF and their paperless solutions, I soon found myself with a lot more desk space than I thought I’d ever have working from home!

So now, you’ve not only merged all of your individual pages back together again, you also found ways to de-clutter your desktop too! Now that’s what I call getting organized!

Use Optical Character Recognition

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR for short, is technology that will scan an image file and detect words or text within that image.

So, those “selfies” you were taking of your documents? They are image files on your smartphone. By uploading those images to a PDF software (we highly recommend Soda PDF) with OCR will transform those images into readable, editable PDFs in seconds!

Not only that, but with OCR enabled, your image file will automatically be scanned for recognizable characters.

You can then run OCR to enable that all the text within this image becomes “recognized”, meaning that the content within the page will no longer be just a picture but a full-fledged document. Kind of like that paper version you used to have sitting on your desk!

You can now start to annotate those documents or even edit them if your OCR technology allows for text editing within the image file.

Curious to learn more about OCR technology and how it can be used to help you de-clutter and go paperless? Soda PDF can show you how. Join our Live Support Events via Facebook where we guide you through our software solutions one step at a time.

Try Soda PDF for FREE

We hope you now see the benefits of going paperless. I know that my struggle with paper has now been resolved once I managed to take a deep breath and find digital solutions to my cluttered desk. Having powerful PDF software can help you relax, which is why I cannot recommend Soda PDF enough.

Get a taste for Soda PDF today with a FREE download of our desktop application, or try one of our many online tools from your web browser. Whether you prefer to work online or offline (or both!), our PDF software has the solutions to help you stay organized.

Do your documents and your desk a favor: go paperless, get organized & join the digital trend!

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