Tips For Forming Scanning Habits

If the last time you broke out your Doxie was last year or last week, congratulations! Today is yet another opportunity to go — or stay — paperless. Besides reducing clutter and increasing productivity, going paperless saves time, space, and money. Luckily, keeping a regular scanning schedule is just like any other habit.

Get in the habit

Habits are small routines that power nearly 40 percent of everyone's daily behaviors. A habit starts with a trigger followed by a specific set of actions. For example, your alarm in the morning may set off a chain of events:

shower 🛀 ⇒ get dressed 👖 ⇒ caffeinate ☕️ ⇒ head to work 👋 (up the road or down the hall)

Good or bad, any routine can become a habit in a relatively short period of time. The key to making any new habit stick is to break it into small, easy parts (e.g., shower, dress). Maybe even exceedingly small, so small that it'd be weird not to do it.

One scan at a time

Instead of tackling a whole filing cabinet, what if you committed to scanning only one page each day? Let a trigger be sorting the mail. If you find anything important, scan a single page. If not, scan a page from your filing cabinet. Like a bull rider at a rodeo, you'll be done in about eight seconds. After a week or two of daily single-page scanning, scan a whole envelope's or file's worth of pages every day for a week or so. Before you know it, you'll have a new habit.

The goal is for any new habit to become second nature. And since habits power so much of our day, intentional habit-creation is an extremely powerful tool in any productivity toolkit. Just be sure to use your new (super)power for good.

Customer Tip: Netfilx and Scan

We love learning from Doxie customers how and why you use our scanners. Possibly one of the best going-paperless suggestions we've received, especially in these socially-distanced times, is to Netflix (or Hulu or Disney+ or Prime or...) and Scan.

Doxie makes it so simple to scan anywhere. Let your trigger be sitting down for your favorite show (new or repeat binges, we don't judge). Leave a stack of paper and your Doxie next to the couch and "scan away" as you Skip Intro for the umpteenth time. Don't overthink it.

If you don't have your Doxie yet, today's the day.

If you don't have a Doxie to call our own, how will you go paperless? Check out all the different models and find the Doxie that suits you best. Place your order. Then wait calmly by your mailbox – because on a day not too far from now, Doxie will arrive.

Those stacks of paper don't have a chance.

Buy Doxie + Go Paperless