A few years ago I made a conscious effort to be as paperless as possible. I'm pretty much there now with almost everything I need accessible on my laptop. I us

A few years ago I made a conscious effort to be as paperless as possible. I'm pretty much there now with almost everything I need accessible on my laptop. I use a Doxie [0] scanner and scan absolutely everything meaningful: documents, receipts, invoices, physical photos, note from friends, Christmas cards, credit cards etc. Having a "scan everything" attitude means I don't have to think about what I do and don't scan. I try and save as many of these files as PDFs with OCR (which the Doxie supports) Every week or two I dump all of the scans from the Doxie into my "Downloads" folder where I rename any files that have obvious content to something more meaningful (easier to search this way). Anything that needs to be manually filed (company documents for example) I do myself. Everything else get automatically sorted using Hazel [1] after 2 weeks in the Download folder. They get sent to an "Archive" folder that is split into subfolders: PDFs, videos, images, music, design files, documents, etc. All files are automatically sorted into [year]/[month] folders. This archive is great as it becomes a location for everything that doesn't have a home. For example I also perform a WhatsApp backup every month or two that adds all new photos and content that I've received from people into the same Archive. Likewise anything I've downloaded that hasn't been deleted or moved somewhere can be found there. [0]: https://www.getdoxie.com/product/doxie-go https://www.getdoxie.com/product/doxie-go [1]: https://www.noodlesoft.com https://www.noodlesoft.com