We recently extolled the use of Evernote in the paperless office, but it looks like the software is now hitting the mainstream.  In today’s Wall Street Journal, tech columnist Walt Mossberg has written a love letter to Evernote praising many of its powerful features.

Courtesy of Flickr User Netwalkerz

As many of you know, earlier this week, Google’s popular web-based email service GMail went down to most users for the better part of a day. While some of us used this as an excuse to unplug and enjoy family or the outdoors, others had important business to attend to and were left high and dry. This incident shines a light on a legitimate concern of leaving important services like email entirely in the cloud, but there were steps users could have taken to be prepared for such an event.

The first possibility is to use Google Labs offline GMail which relies on Google Gears. If you haven’t installed Gears, I highly recommend it. It will not only give you access to GMail and Google Calendar while offline (and when Google services go down) but also to a host of other websites. The thing about GMail offline though is it needs to be enabled through the web interface which was down during the outage, so unless you enabled it previously, you were out of luck.

The second and more versatile option is to connect to GMail through POP or IMAP using a desktop email client such as Apple’s Mail application.  I recommend using IMAP due to the inherent two-way communication with Google’s servers which provides a consistent user experience across multiple devices.  This is especially useful if you access your email on multiple computers, use the GMail web interface or access GMail on an iPhone or other mobile device.  Like offline GMail, IMAP also has to be enabled via the web interface and I recommend doing that right now.  An additional upside to using POP or IMAP is, during this past outage you were able to continue sending and receiving email unlike with the offline GMail option described above.

It’s probably worth enabling both of the options described in this post as this will provide the greatest amount of flexibility during the next outage.  If you have any suggestions on accessing web services during offline or outage time, please leave your suggestions in the comments.  Also, stop wasting time and be sure to enable these services right now so that you’ll be prepared for next time.

There are a few tools that are essential to my workflow.  In the coming weeks I will detail each one of these, but today I’ll provide a quick overview of these tools and why they are important.  From the name of this site it should be apparent that a mac is one of my essential tools, however, some of my key tools are available for both mac and pc.

I have tried various software tools for document organization, but I have found none that serve my needs better than Evernote.  This program has built in OCR capabilities (converts scanned images or pictures into searchable text), automatic backups and a powerful synchronization engine for those of you that do your work on multiple computers.

So how is it that all the paper that enters my life gets converted to an electronic format?  The answer is an amazing little device by Fujitsu called the ScanSnap.  Before purchasing this puppy, scanning anything always seemed such a chore.  This scanner has a document feed and can scan two-sided color documents at a rate of 8 pages per minute.  Each time I use the scanSnap, it continues to blow me away.

Finally, what do you do with all the documents you just finished scanning?  Well hopefully you can recycle most of them, but shredding is required for those containing personal information.  I don’t have a recommendation for a specific shredder, but at a minimum I would recommend a crosscuttingone.

In the coming weeks I will provide specific details on how I use each of these tools to keep my paper piles small, so be on the lookout.

About a year ago I found myself barely able to find my macbook on my desk amongst the piles of paper I had strewn about.  On top of this, I had a few drawers filled with files, these were at least neatly arranged due to a habit I picked up the year before after reading the well known Getting Things Done.  But all of this paper seemed ridiculous in a world with computers, scanners and 1 terabyte disk drives.  So on that day I made a commitment to slowly ween myself of all the paper.  Today I have only a small scribble pad on my desk (and my mac) and one small drawer of files, I’m not totally paperless, but much improved.  The goal of this site is for me to share what I’ve picked up over the past year, as well as interesting articles I find and also to learn what techniques my readers are using to remove paper from their life.