Now, with the advent of things like smartphones, tablets, and the iPad, new applications designed for those devices are making it easier and more practical to go paperless.

Penultimate: Your iPad notepad

Penultimate by Cocoa Box turns your iPad into a notebook, allowing you to jot notes and create sketches in multiple colors, separate them into notebooks by topic or project, and then email all or part of your notes in PDF format. It even includes three built-in “papers” (graph paper, unlined and ruled), but you can import images of different backgrounds or papers — or download paper packs — to create your own texture or style. Price: $1.99.

SignMyPad: Simple contract sign-offs

The Android- and iPad-compatible PDF reader SignMyPad has built-in annotation functionality, allowing you to sign and date PDF documents right from your iPad and then email it to another party. You can also save documents into versions for gaining multiple signatures, and the app can import documents from and save them to Dropbox. Price: $3.99 for the basic version, $19.99 for SignMyPad Pro, which adds geolocation tagging.

MyFax: Fax without a fax

If you work with clients or colleagues who still use fax machines, MyFax’s mobile faxing app, available for iOS and Blackberry, lets you send and receive faxes from your smartphone and via your email account. Just snap a photo of the document you want to send (the app is optimized for sending photos of text), choose the recipient from your Address Book and send. To fax by email, attach the document to an email message, address it to the fax number plus an @myfax.com and send. To receive a fax, simply give out your MyFax number, and your received documents will be available as an email attachment. Price: Free app, service costs $10/month after a free trial.

JotNot: Turn your iPhone into a handheld scanner

JotNot lets you scan from your iPhone, email the scan as a PDF or image, and fax the scan to U.S. numbers. You can add pages to documents, creating a multi-page scan, as well as delete and reorder pages and send documents to EverNote, DropBox, or Google Docs. JotNot can scan and save a variety of documents, including receipts, business cards, and notes. Price: Free.

DocScanner: Simple scanning

DocScanner is a scanner app for the iPhone, Mac, Android, Qt, and the Symbian S60 that allows you to scan documents simply by taking a picture. It then automatically crops everything other than the document out of the picture and even detects your document’s paper size. Other helpful features include the ability to search multiple-page documents, as well as words within documents. Price: $4.99.

Business Card Reader: Quickly add new contacts

The multi-platform Business Card Reader from SHAPE Services lets you take a photo of a business card, and then it “reads” the picture, extracts the contact data, and enters it into your smartphone’s address book. The built-in browser even lets you check out a new contact’s LinkedIn page right from the app. Price: $4.99 for multi-language support, $3.99 for Asian languages only.

OfficeDrop: Scan to the cloud

OfficeDrop‘s app scans documents directly to the cloud for storage and sharing. The ScanDrop desktop app is available for both PC and Mac, but the iPhone and Android Scanner apps allow you to scan and upload documents using your smartphone. Once uploaded, the document’s text is searchable, thanks to OCR, and sharable with colleagues. Price: Free

Square: Easy payments and receipts

Square, available for Android and most iOS devices, lets you accept credit card payments directly from your smartphone and uses “smart receipts” to send to customers via email or text message. You can create a display with photos and prices so that customers can view your products directly from your iPad, for example, and then keep track of the number of sales you’ve made in a given day. Price: Free app and reader.

Image courtesy of Flickr user mattjiggins

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Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of Green Tips posts, a collaboration between WebWorkerDaily and our sister site, Earth2Tech.

Going paperless is now a realistic option to making your work life more friendly on the planet and more efficient in general. From web-based faxing, to replacing all mail with email, to toting around your own coffee mug, the benefits of eliminating paper can both preserve natural resources and save you money. Ditching excess paper can also streamline many business practices, eliminating clutter and adding searchablity, data protection and ubiquitous access. Here are seven tips to get you started on your green paperless office.

1. Faxing & Mail

Bring faxing into the digital age. Web-based faxing services have been around for a while, and services out there include GreenFax, Drop.io and MyFax. To make the most out of these variously priced fax capabilities, be sure to make a digitized version of your pen and ink signature on a transparent background. The next time you need to sign something and fax it back, you’ll be all set to do it without ever printing.

Services that convert paper mail to email don’t actually help to save paper, and some have faced privacy concerns. But the innovative Zumbox offers an electronic alternative to your physical mailbox. Users can send the electronic files of would-be snail mail pieces directly to your Zumbox, just by knowing your street address. Businesses can also pay to contact target customers within certain geographic areas with special offers. While Zumbox needs to build momentum to really be useful — as they need a critical mass of both senders and recipients to work well — it’s a concept that has been proven by postal services in other countries.

Most mailed paper bills can be eliminated with e-billing. Opting out of direct marketing (i.e. junk mail) and pre-approved credit card offers (call 1-888-5-OPTOUT) will also help reduce the amount of dead trees coming into your mailbox.

2. Invoicing

You don’t have to just receive e-bills, but you can generate them, too. Invoicing software like QuickBooks generates invoices that you can email. there are plenty of “freemium” online options too, including Freshbooks, Cashboard and CurdBee, or for a really simple solution, try the Google Calendar Invoice Creator.

3. Schedules & Calendars

Calendars and agendas can be hard to let go of in physical form, but the advantages of going paperless can ease the pain. With Google Calendar, MS Outlook and Apple’s iCal your schedule is available and up-to-date wherever you go. Online task managers like Google Tasks and Remember the Milk can keep you on top of all of your to-do lists for a project without using a scrap of paper.

4. Mobile Tools

Your cell phone can be one of the easiest tools to help you banish the paper build up. A variety of iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps allow you to invoice (Freshbooks), manage tasks (Task2Gather), handle scheduling (Tungle and TimeBridge) and remotely back up your files (SugarSync). Better yet, apps such as DocScanner, JotNot, and WorldCardMobile turn your phone into a document or business card scanner, getting rid of the need to bring paper back home with you. Online service Qipit, which is also available as an iPhone app, allows you to use any cameraphone (or plain digicam for that matter) to make digital copies of whiteboards or documents.

5. Digitizing What You Can’t Avoid

Try as you might to avoid eliminating paper, chances are you will get stuck with some sort of paper that you need to keep on file. A number of services can help get the paper clutter out of your office and into the cloud. Shoeboxed and OfficeDrop both make scanned versions of hard copies that you send them by mail, and customers can also upload files to the services for offsite storage.

If you prefer to do the scanning yourself, there are a few hardware options that are worth the investment. The Fujitsu ScanSnap combination of auto-feed document scanner and integrated software wins raves reviews from users. The retro-futuristic Neat Receipts and cute-but-functional Doxie both offer more portable scanning with OCR and cloud-based storage integration.

6. Storage

Backing up all of the important documents you’ve just digitized is a no-brainer. You can use Mozy (available in “Home” and “Pro” flavors for a fee), DropBox (up to 2Gb free) or LiveMesh (up to 5GB free) to move your important files to the more energy efficient cloud.

7. Where You Least Expect It

If you really get ambitious about phasing out paper from your daily routines, you can try some extra steps. Replace your sticky notes with reusable adhesive dry-erase sheets. Also consider eliminating the paper from your morning coffee ritual with reusable filters and a travel mug, instead of the paper cups from the café. Finally, if there’s still paper you just can’t cut out of your life; reuse it as scratch paper, recycle it or add it to your compost.

What technology or tactics do you use to avoid using paper? Share your answers in the comments.

Trenton DuVal has managed the online communications efforts of nonprofits focused on creating a more sustainable, just and equitable world since 2005. His varied experiences living and working on five continents have included professional gold farming, crossing the Atlantic by sailboat, a few meals with Nobel Laureates and a tragic run-in with a three-toed sloth.

Photo courtesy Flickr user EricaJoy, licensed under CC 2.0

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That has a nice ring to it. But is it really attainable for anyone other than those who can get obsessive about scanning and shredding?

I’ve been trying to reduce paper, but in the process, I’ve felt a mental backlash that is driving me back to paper. Hey, I was one of the first folks to get a Palm early on, convinced that I would be replacing my paper organizer. I had one of the first Kyocera smart phone prototypes in 2000, seeing the possibility of getting rid of my paper address book, too.

My Failed Attempts at Paperless

When I got my 3-in-1 printer, I was gungho about having a scanner. I set out to rid my garage of the most onerous paper pile ever – magazines. I have boxes and boxes of magazines either with articles I’ve written or articles about me and my work in them. I haven’t been able to throw them out. But scanning them, while it seemed promising, has left me with a slew of disorganized scanned articles and once organized magazine piles in disarray.

I just think I’m missing a critical part of my brain that can go from filing papers in manila folders and placing them into hanging folders and doing the virtual version of that. To this day, I’m lucky if I can find a digital document, even with the handy Finder search. But give me a few minutes, and I can almost always place my hands on a paper I need.

These days, I still cannot get rid of my paper calendar even with iCal on my laptop, iCal on my iPhone, 30Boxes on the Web and using Spanning Sync to sync it all up with Google Calendar. It may sound like overkill, but I still forget appointments and double book myself. I have managed to get rid of the paper address book which was perpetually caked with White-Out and eraser marks and am using my Mac address book synced with my iPhone.

But in general, I’m drowning in paper. Stacks of it, files of it, drawers full of it. I know there must be a better way.

Advice from Our Bloggers

I’ve turned to my fellow WWD bloggers to find out what they think of the Paperless Office concept, how they’ve gone about trying to attain it and to what degree of success.

Imran Ali pointed me toward his review of Shoeboxed, a way to organize receipts. That tip alone has set my mind whirring about possibilities because the only thing worse than piles of paper is a big, fat envelope full of completely disorganized receipts.

Imran does feel a paperless office is possible, “the only paper I use is a $2 notebook from Muji! I tend not to print unless I’m sending snail mail and I’ve gotten into the habit of reading & archiving almost everything I need to on-screen. Invoicing, billing etc. is all issued electronically.”

Adds Imran, “I guess with email and IM being my principal form of communication, it’s been easy to ‘force’ paper-based communication into a digital channel…now with a whole bunch of web-based applications, more and more activities can be taken into digital form. On the whole I’ve managed to stay paperless without contriving my workflow…though I’d really love some sorta ebook reader, tablet or supersize iPhone for reading.”

Mike Gunderloy believes a paperless office is possible. “Or at least, you can settle on an amount of paper you’re willing to live with and keep it down to that amount.”

Says Mike, “The key for me was to get a decent scanner – the ScanSnap s510M in my case – and start just running everything first through the scanner, and then through the shredder, as soon as it arrives. The other essential tool for me is EagleFiler, which lets me save everything as separate files and still find them quickly. And of course a decent backup plan.”

Judi Sohn feels that the problem isn’t the paper she generates. “It’s the paper that’s thrust upon me. I have been working towards a paperless office for a while now, some days more successful than others.  But no matter how hard I try, people still assume I want paper. I actually had someone FAX me a print out from their email. How insane is that? I get my faxes as emailed PDFs, so I received an email which had an attachment that was a picture of an email. Nuts. Those are the people that make this impossible.”

To try to go paperless, Judi first got an eFax account and a scanner. “That has gone a long way. While I’d say my professional life is 100% digital these days, the paper in my office right now is all related to my kids. School reports, flyers and the like. I also think something like PDFPen or Acrobat Pro is essential for getting paper into PDF without a lot of hassle.”

Scott Blitstein says that he guesses going paperless “is theoretically possible with the right equipment, process and effort – basically time and money.”

Scott also says he generates very little printed copy in his work. “I do all of my invoicing and messaging electronically, and receive as many of my bills as possible that way as well. I do need to have printed copies of some work orders and other documents for signature purposes but those are kept to a minimum.”

Adds Scott, “While I do my best to minimize my printing, if I do have to print something, or if it comes to me on paper, it will probably stay in that format. I do very little digitizing of pre-existing paper items and still maintain a healthy paper based filing system.”

What are benefits of being paperless as a Web worker?

Imran Ali says…

“For me it’s really just two things…

1. Mobility – most of the documentation I need can be accessed from a computer or a phone.
2. Serendipity – ensuring things are in digital form means that they can be searchable, I can do analysis, reporting etc. which can give me valuable and surprising insights. If things are on paper, it’s sorta dead information – in digital form, they’re alive and can be more readily remixed.”

Mike Gunderloy says…

“Less clutter! And it’s faster to find things by search on the computer than to remember where I filed them by hand.”

Judi Sohn says…

“1. I can access my data from anywhere.
2. Searchable archives.”

Free From Paper

Clearly there are business benefits to going paperless. I dream of a totally paper-free office. But getting the right equipment to make it happen is key. Then making the time to migrate from paper to digital takes time. The biggest obstacle, however, is mindset. You have to make a commitment to freedom from paper and be consistent in your efforts.

Have you gone paperless? If so, how did you do it? If not, what have been the barriers?

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Once they’re in Pixily, all of your documents become searchable PDFs. You can use their web interface to print, download, or view the documents in your account. You can also share them with others, on a limited-time basis (and those viewing a shared document don’t need a Pixily account). Pricing starts at $4.95 per month for 1000 pages stored, though you need to move up to the $14.95 per month to get the scanning service (50 pages per month; you can buy more). This may seem pricy, but they’re hoping you view it as a good tradeoff against the time it would take to do the scanning yourself.

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