Kenneth Liu

I wasn’t going to post on this, but since it’s Earth Day, I figured I’d do a “green” post. I’m not that organized, especially when it comes to the piles of paper and mail littered everywhere in my home office. I’m kind of a packrat in that way. I needed a file cabinet in a really bad way. But I opted to experiment and go “paperless“. Instead of plunking money on a file cabinet that I have no space for, I got a nifty multipage scanner that saves everything .pdf. I also automated most of my bills online. So most of my files are on my computer and backed up by dropbox. I’m also trying to integrate Evernote (recommended by Kevin) into my system to keep my notetaking, scanning, and everything else together and sync’ed between my desktop and laptop. I also have to be much more conscientious about pressing that “print” button for all this to work.

My biggest challenge is what to do with Matthew’s drawings. He draws about 20+ pages of stories and illustrations a day. Plus, he can’t bear to throw away his typical epic battle scenes. He’s like his dad in that respect (the packrat part!). There’s a lot of advice out there, but I can’t keep it up. I’ve tried scanning his stuff on his own flickr page to show his grandparents, but the pile is too insurmountable. So my attempts to be green are thwarted by my 5-year-old. 

Lastly, instead of jotting notes or to-do-lists on scrap pieces of paper that I usually end up losing, I use Reqall to send voice messages that are transcribed and sent as an email to my inbox. The transcription isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done. They’ve butchered my wife’s name several times. But they do save my message as a .wav file if I can’t make it out.

So how do you handle your paper clutter? How do you conserve the use of paper? How can we better at this as a church?

[wow. that was a geeky post]