Digitise your Personal Documents.

After working for a huge corporation for the past 10 years, I found myself with a bunch of stuffs most of them documents that I deemed important. I actually took a photo of my office one last time and as you can see I have boxes on the floor that contains documents that I have not processed. I actually had two huge pile of stuffs. Because I didn't have the time to process them I just placed everything on the box.

This taught me two lessons:
1. Bring only what you use in the office.
2. Digitise documents as much as you can.

This post is about the second lesson: Digitise documents as much as you can. Over the years I have accumulated documents in the form of applications, contracts, receipts, billing statements, and etc. As much as I tried to sort and throw away as much as I can I always end up getting a bunch of paper documents that I don't know if I can throw them away.

Let me share to you what I did with my documents.

I started with this folders and envelops.

I have to say that I was force to do a pre-work in processing my documents as my new employer asked me some requirements and documentation that I have to swim through my box and searched for them. In the process I was able to throw away some documents that I don't really need.

Since I could not do this during the weekdays I decided to spend the whole afternoon on a Saturday to process this.

Here are the tools you need to do this:
1. Mobile phone or camera
2. Laptop (if you can do everything in your mobile phone then you don't need this)
3. Cloud Server (there are companies that offers free space like Google Drive, Evernote, and Dropbox)
4. Internet connection.

Step 1. Group you documents per context.
In my case, I separated contracts, credentials, certificates, receipts, and others.

Step 2. Take photos of each document. Make sure the you are getting a very clear image.

Step 3. Upload the photos (using your laptop or mobile phone) to a Cloud Server. I am using Google Drive. This is the screenshot of my drive.

I titled my cloud folder "Digital Self" and then created separate folders per category. One thing I like about Google Drive is that you can later on go to your email's search bar and just search for your document and it will come up easy. I heard and read about how this works with Evernote and Dropbox also but I have not used them.

Step 4. Rename / label the uploaded document for easy search later on.

There are tools now that actually uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to help you do convert your documents as a word document but you need to pay for them. If you have the means then it is a good way to make sure that your document is searchable.

Do this for every document in your pile. And in the process throw away documents that you think you will not use.

Once you are able to digitise your documents you can now keep them in one place and have the peace of mind that you now have a digital back-up in case the original documents gets lost/stolen.

Putting them in a cloud server enables you to access them as soon as you are connected to the internet.

There you have it. Happy digitising your documents!