There comes a time in every man's life when he has to be honest with himself. The realization comes that you will never play in a rock band...you will never play professional sports in front of an adoring crowd of onlookers....and you will probably never have the occasion to wear that leather jacket with the fringes on it again. That day came for me about a month ago, as Meghan and I were walking through the office and making decisions on what to do with the back room of my office....the room that I never used, hardly ever walked in, and was sort of scared of.
You see, in that room lurked empty filing cabinets, lots of old tax reference materials that I had never thrown away, chairs that had met their demise by losing bolts and casters, an old antique desk that hadn't been used in about three years. Scary stuff, huh?
Maybe not to you....but to this man who had claimed that his CPA firm was paperless, it was a scary reminder that while I NO LONGER KEPT PAPER (everything is scanned in and kept on my server, but not in paper form), I had never gotten rid of all the paper that I had. I had old payables files for the firm, going back to 2002, which had never been scanned. All those old IRS reference books from 2003...old reference guides that are now online for me...I had left all that paper back there. I even had all the old files that held all the old paper. Why?
I really don't know. All I do know is that it took my wife looking me in the face and asking me "What do you intend to do with this paper? How will it make your firm and your life better by keeping it?" that I realized I had no plan and no excuse. I needed to get rid of it. The clutter was really cramping my feng shui vibe. And honestly, there are younger CPAs in my THRIVEal coaching course who were running circles around me when it came to technology and being paperless. I had to do better. So, we made a decision to move forward...
We called our shred vendor, Shred360, and they came out. I knew it felt like a lot of paper, but I didn't know how much it truly was. They shredded over 1,200 pounds of paper from my office. Yes, you read that right....one thousand two hundred pounds of paper. With each piece/box/shred of paper that left my office, I felt a little more relieved, a little more like I was actually paperless after all. The value that this change adds to my life is measurable and wonderful. I can't really explain it, but I feel it every day when I walk in that clean back office, which now is an open map for a new design and use. And once the job was done, Meghan and I rewarded ourselves with some office furniture to fill up some of the space, furniture that serves a purpose unlike paper from the early days of the Bush presidency.
For those of you who feel like you want to make a move to a paperless environment, I encourage you to take the leap and DO IT! If you want to talk with me about it, bounce ideas off me, ask me about the trauma and separation anxiety associated with getting rid of your paper, call me! I can walk you through the process, the software we use to continue our paperless vision, and I can teach you how to make it work in your business. These are the reasons WHY we do what we do....it's those things that make your life easier that we embrace!
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