Mobile workers are the kind of people that spend a lot of time away from the office – or home for that matter. They will usually be equipped with some form of device (laptop or tablet) that will enable them to work wherever they happen to be. Rather than carrying around loads of paper, you should figure out how to become a paperless mobile worker and develop a paperless habit.
How to start
First off you need something or someone to digitize paper as it comes in. This could be you with a scanner, an office bound admin person or a third party service. Whatever you settle on it is essential that he paperwork doesn’t stack up and become something that doesn’t get done. This habit needs to form so that it is dealt with regularly and doesn’t back up.
Content Consumption
Once you have a method for digitizing in place you next need to consider how the content will be accessed. If you work for a large business then it’s probably time to speak to the IT department about any document management tools that are expected to be used and compatible means of access. If you don’t already have access to a document management system then you can easily create your own structure by creating a nest of folders which describe what the files are so that you can recover them easily.
As long as it is compatible with your data protection policy this folder structure could exist within a cloud syncing service such as Dropbox, Google Drive or SkyDrive. This can make it incredibly easy to grab the files on the go from a variety of devices. Most mobile and operating systems have a app written for it and if that fails you can always get access to the files from a web page. I’ve been a user of SkyDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox (in order of how much I use them) for sometime now. Both on Android and iOS these services are incredibly reliable and ones to look at first.
Evernote is also of note as a store for these documents as you can easily organise these alongside any notes or images that you may have stored in there. If you are a premium subscriber then the text within these documents get scanned and are become part of a search. The hand writing recognition is OK but text recognition very good. So certainly worth experimenting with.
Benefits
The main benefits of going paperless for the mobile worker is having everything to hand no matter where you are. With a decent filing system you should be able to easily put your hands on files whether you are in the office or not. You will probably need a connection to the Internet to make the most of this setup. But then that is a bit of a given now a days when you are out and about.
It’s not that important how you go paperless just that you work out a way how to do it. If you have gone through or going through the transition to working paperless please leave a comment to let us know how it is going.
One Response
The trigger was another house move. Just simply too many boxes and files of paper moving from one place to another where all they did was taking up space. I had little interest in buying a scanner and software and spend weekends converting all these documents. I thought there must be more people with a similar problem and therefore brought together a few professional players that can offer a convenient document scanning (and shredding) service to individuals, households and home offices – it’s called: Paperless Home. Solved my problem, hopefully it is equally useful for everyone wanting to go paperless. [only in the UK for the moment].