optimized living

One of my goals over the last month was to stop printing so much. My file cabinet is currently overflowing and I’ve gotten tired of my “To File” piling growing and not actually getting filed.

Of course I can’t stop everyone, like my insurance company, from sending me tons of paper. BTW, why do insurance companies insist on sending so many pieces of paper? The top drawer in my filing cabinet is mostly insurance papers. Even though I can’t stop others from generating papers, at least I can stop printing payment confirmations, credit reports, statements, etc.

That led me to search for a PDF printer utility. First of all, what’s a PDF? PDF stands for Portable Document Format. One cool thing about PDFs is that they can digitally capture what you would have printed. After you “print,” you just load up the file in Adobe Acrobat Reader, and can view what looks like a printout.

After a little searching I finally ran across a really nice (free) Windows utility, CutePDF Writer, which acts like a printer and saves the print out to a PDF file.

So now when I print something, I see the following:

After I hit Print, I just enter a filename for the PDF and it saves it. No more paper, no more filing.

Here are some suggestions for getting the most out of printing to PDFs with CutePDF:

• Make CutePDF your default printer. This way you’ll generally error on the side of saving to a PDF rather than physically printing.
• Keep a consistent folder and file naming convention. I’ve created a set of folders, such was Credit Reports, Order Confirmations, Rebates, etc. Also, I’ve named my files like this: “20070519 words about the file.pdf.” That first number is the date, and by putting the date in that order (year, month, day) my file names sort nicely by date.
• Back up your PDFs. Make sure that you back up your documents using whatever method you prefer (ex. burn a CD, copy them to a flash drive, copy them to another computer, etc.).

So far this system has worked out great.

• “Filing” is instant since it happens when I choose a folder and filename. No more paper documents waiting to be filed.
• It’s easy to find documents by browsing files or searching.
• There’s no need to buy lots of paper and printer ink.
• My office space is cleaner and there is less unnecessary clutter (there’s still a lot though :))

Yeah, I’ll admit, it’s not that paperless office they’ve been talking about for years, but it has certainly saved me time and hassle.