How to Do The Impossible: Create a Paperless Life, Never Chec...

1. No more mail:

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To begin, get removed from junk mail lists and common commercial mailing lists. There are a few ways to do this: 1) Get remove from the most common junkmail lists (this costs a few dollars in some cases) and check alternative strategies at www.stopjunkmail.org, 2) Use LifeLock, or another identity protection service, which automatically removes you from large mailing lists, one of the most common vehicle for identity theft. Last, we’ll have your mail forwarded to special processing centers, where it is all scanned and emailed to you. One popular service is called Remote Control Mail, and there are two big benefits to the time-focused and mobile-minded: relevant postal mail is funneled into e-mail, so you can check both email and postal mail at once (“batching” both at the same time); you can travel freely whenever and wherever without ever missing a letter.

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-Give your accountant power of attorney to sign specific checks (for tax documents, etc.) on your behalf.

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not only cuts down on checks but also finance-related mail, which you can then forward to your accountant for handling start-to-finish.

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I’ve replaced a brick of a wallet with a razor-thin money clip holding four credit cards

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one debit card for emergencies, and health/car insurance. I haven’t had a single problem. Some smaller shops will prefer that you cover coffee with cash, for example, but credit is accepted.

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1. No more answering the phone:
Use a service like GrandCentral to listen to voicemail as they’re being left. Each caller is required to announce their name before the call is dialed, and you are able to preview the name and send them to voicemail, where you can listen to their message as they leave it. If you want to speak with them, you can jump in. If not, let them leave a voicemail and — at the set times when you batch — go to step 2.

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2. No more voicemail:
Get your voicemail delivered to your e-mail inbox, which then serves as your single communications “funnel”. This would be our single “bucket” in the parlance of David Allen, and our remote control postal mail joins the voicemail here: e-mail, postal mail, and voicemail all in one place. GrandCentral can e-mail audio files, but for those who want text, Simulscribe is a popular option with near 90% transcription accuracy. Stop managing separate inputs from office phone voicemail, cell phone voicemail, and multiple email accounts. Consolidate. To further encourage all people to communicate with you via e-mail, there are two approaches that I’ve used effectively: indicate in your voicemail greeting that people must leave their e-mail address, and respond to them via e-mail; use Jott to send a voice message to them as an e-mail.

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3. No more returning calls:
Pinger enables you to send voicemail to people without calling them. Why would you want to do that? From their website:

We’ve all been there-you make a call and think to yourself, “please don’t pick up”, or you call and think “I hope I’m not interrupting…” With Pinger you leave the message at your convenience, and they get it at their convenience. Unlike voicemail, there is no ringing, no annoying prompts, no lengthy greetings — just your message.

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-Postal Mail: I’ve been making an effort to call individual vendors (catalogues & charities mostly) to stop sending me stuff. It’s a bit time-consuming, but the bulk mail stop services can’t stop these.

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-Biz Voicemail: I started using a virtual PBX about 6-months ago for my biz, and LOVE it (RingCentral.com) My clients only have to remember one #, and all my messages/faxes get sent to my blackberry.

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It doesn’t matter if you answer their questions they left you on voicemail by email religiously, they just *want* (not need…) to talk to you. You can definitely get your point across by forwarding all your calls straight to mailbox and answering most of them by email, but somehow it doesn’t satisfy them…

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On the topic of cool services that increase productivity—check out http://teleflip.com. You can use it to send an SMS message to any US/Canadian cellphone via email, regardless of provider. It’s still free. The replies go back to your inbox.

Example: 2125551234@teleflip.com

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Here’s the URL to the actual service description: https://www.teleflip.com/blog/services/flipout/

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Another great alternative for a free phone is AIM Phoneline. I just signed up for one myself, one public and one private. It’s like Skype or Vonage except it’s a real phone number for free. Check out my blog entry for more details. http://hackerclass.blogspot.com/2007/07/call-me-636-590-35

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I use callwave. It is free and does a job almost as good as simulscribe.

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Jot.com (which is currently free)

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Jott.com is similar to pinger.com and Simulscribe.

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I’ve been using RemoteControlMail (now called EarthClassMail) and GrandCentral for a while. For voicemail transcription, I used to use a service called DictoMail (http://www.dictomail.com/).

For paying bills, I’ve started trying PayTrust http://paytrust.com/

My problem recently has been having to deposit the affiliate checks (when they don’t deposit directly into my bank account or paypal account). Unless you have a better idea, I’m going to try out a scan checking service called DepositNow (https://www.depositnow.com) which a number of banks also offer as a service. -Simon

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check out GotVoice. Similar to Spinvox and SimulScribe, but GotVoice can retrieve your cell, home and work phone voicemail and send them to you as text in SMS and email.

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GotVoice. It is sort of like Yahoo for voicemail — a nifty web-based voicemail management system. I had signed up for it before the holidays to “review” the service. It worked with my iPhone, my AT&T line and my softphone VoIP service. It pulled the voicemails from the various systems and put them in the order received. More importantly, it sent me a transcript of the voicemails in the email inbox. In less that 50 minutes I read your sentiments.”

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