Labels for Life : Getting OrganizedLabels for Life will give tips for organizing your life, home and office.

Wouldn’t it be nice not to have piles of paper in heaps, in files, covering your desk, on your kitchen table? Weren’t we promised paperless offices years ago. Except for some very determined and organized people, few have been able to accomplish this.

Banks, credit card companies, online storage companies all encourage us to save trees, take advantage of the technology available, opt for ebills and actually establish paperless offices.

It is important to make a commitment to a paperless office. Then systematically one needs to opt for ebills. Some online paying systems make this very easy and painless. Once you’ve switched to ebills, it also helps to sign on for alerts by email. This can be customized so that you’re alerted as soon as your ebill is available, 5 or 9 days (say) before the due date or if the bill has not been paid online by the due date; and of course all of the above, if you choose. There is then the task of creating electronic folders on your computer for all your payees. The ebills can then go into the respective folders, all organized for the taxman. Many businesses that provide ebills have not yet furnished a means by which individuals can mark their ebills as paid. Ebills may be available in PDF form but anything you might want to add to it cannot then be saved unless you have the appropriate Adobe software yourself. You can usually take a snapshot of whatever you have filled in and paste it and save it in Word.

It would be wonderful to eliminate all tax forms: income, business, employer…….all! But we’re not there yet. Fortunately it’s coming. Even the IRS promises to have everything in electronic form soon.

Once we’ve made the commitment to ourselves to do this it will need a concerted effort to make sure paper is not generated for anything. All invoices would have to be sent via email. If you have a business, eventually you would need to roll out an online service where clients can have accounts and be able to deal with payments etc. online. There might be stray bills that still come via snail mail. But they would be so few and far between, it would become very easy to immediately file away in the appropriately custom label file in those very stylish file drawers that are now available.

Credit card companies, financial institutions and others are constantly pushing everyone to save some trees and request ebills. One reason why people are reluctant is probably their limited access to digital storage. But no more. These days all sorts of storage is available in the internet “cloud.”

Digital photographs, videos, all sorts of electronic files, your daily backups can all be stored in a safe, remote location right from your own desktop. There are many advantages to this not the least of which is being invariably forced to sort through all the digital data cluttering up your hard drive, categorize them in some way, choose and pick from them and in short, get organized!

Digital storage totally bypasses the need to buy and burn and make custom labels for CDs or DVDs and store them in boxes on shelves. However, if you do choose to use CDs or DVDs make sure to label and mark them as you go. With web storage, digital information is freed from one computer and /or location. It can be accessed from almost anywhere via any internet-connected device.

Earlier this month Microsoft launched its SkyDrive service that offers 5GB of free, safe storage accessed via one’s Live ID. SkyDrive offers personal, shared and public folders which facilitates safe file-sharing with friends and family and the public at large.

Free, unlimited storage is available from MediaFire. One doesn’t need to register for this site. The site is accessed via a cookie stored in the individual’s computer. However, it is recommended that one register for their free account. This way there is no chance of unwittingly deleting the cookie and losing all one’s stored files. MediaFire, at the moment, offers unlimited uploads but each file is limited to 100 MB. MediaFire also offers safe, personal file storage and the ability to safely share files with others.

Mozy

Xdrive offers 5GB of free storage for backups. However, for under $10 a month or an annual charge of $99.50, it is possible to get 50 GB for backup of one’s personal data. Carbonite offers only paid but unlimited storage for backups. Box.net offers 1 GB for free and 5GB for a charge of $7.95 a month. Mozy Online Backup Home offers 2GB for free and unlimited storage for $4.95 a month.