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During the process of moving, I realized that I have way, way too much paper. It’s undoubtedly a side effect of a) my mother’s extreme enjoyment of back-to-school sales, which I inherited and which, during school, caused me to compulsively buy notebooks and Post-Its in bulk quantities at the beginning of each semester; b) a self-described desire to be a writer that caused me to carry a notebook [or three] with me at all times and take copious notes on everything anyone around me was saying starting in early 2003 and carrying on until now; and c) a sentimental nature that caused me to attribute memories to material objects that I associated with them—notes, ticket stubs, photographs, invitations, programs, papers, clippings, and the like.

Either way, I really want to reduce the amount of paper in my life. So here’s what I’ve been doing, and some potential alternatives that my fellow unclutterers might want to try.

  • Evernote. I just got my Evernote account earlier this week, and I’m in serious like. I’m using it to archive journals, bits of fiction, old notebooks with salvageable writing and ideas, and drafts for future blog posts. I discovered it upon finding out that Google Notebook, which is honestly my true love, was no longer under development. Google was actually telling its Notebook users to migrate to Google Docs, which I’d used and liked in the past, but which lacks the intuitiveness of both Notebook and Evernote—no tagging, only folder-sorting of the kind that I thought Google had eschewed from day one.

    At any rate, everything that I’m uploading to Evernote has to be typed instead of scanned in, because even though my handwriting is superb, writing on grid paper makes it almost impossible for a text recognition program to identify. The typing isn’t so bad, though—it means I get to decide whether something is good enough to be typed out and uploaded before I actually do it, so all drunken/emo/nonsensical ramblings aren’t going to make the cut.

    [As an added bonus, Evernote is also supplanting my current desktop-based management system of blog post ideas, drafts, snippets, and outlines, which is, embarrassingly enough, composed on a series of about two hundred Stickie notes. Yes, it's embarrassing. Yes, there's no feasible way to back it up. So Evernote is coming to the rescue.]

  • Flickr. As soon as I can reasonably afford it, I’m purchasing a Flickr Pro account so I can scan, upload, and tag all my old paper memorabilia and all the detritus that I’ve kept for sentimental reasons. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be able to get rid of all of it, but a significant reduction is in order, that’s for damn sure.
  • Craigslist. This is how I’m going to advertise the yard sale I’m going to have in order to get rid of the completely unused notebooks of grid paper and stationery and Post-Its and all other manner of school-related detritus that I’m not going to use, even if I stayed in school for the rest of my life.

I’m going to be posting occasional updates on my progress as I work my way down this list—including the papers that I can’t get rid of and how I’m going to manage them. Thoughts? Allegations? Any other suggestions as to what I might be forgetting?

Related posts:

  1. The Unending Trail to Paper-Freedom: My Addiction to Post-Its, and The Withdrawal That Followed
  2. Reducing Library Clutter: 5 Easy Ways