Cutting Out The Dead Wood Use these methods to reduce the amount of paper you use in your office.

While many home office professionals are taking steps toeliminate or at least reduce the endless streams of paper flowingin and out of their offices, others still face piles of paper,stacks of mail and file cabinets too stuffed to open. By making afew changes in the way you handle information-whether paper-basedor electronic-you can reduce the amount of paper in youroffice.

• When a piece of paper crosses your desk, make a decision aboutit immediately, rather than stack it on top of or alongside otherpapers. Before you decide to keep a piece of paper, make sureit's information you need to keep for future reference ratherthan something that you need "just in case." If you keepsomething, yet can't find it, it's of no value to you.

• Scan documents into your computer, then toss the paperversions. But be careful not to keep so much extraneous informationon your hard drive that you get bogged down searching for thedocuments you need. It's easier to store scanned referenceinformation (documents you may need at a later date) on disks orother types of external tape drives. Make it easy to find thesedocuments later by storing them by category. For example, store allpublicity documents on one Zip disk and marketing information onanother.

• Use your computer to send and receive faxes. When you receive afax, file it on your hard drive, a disk or other external tapedrive. When you fax a document not already on your hard drive,simply scan the information into your computer and fax it. If youwon't refer to the faxed information again, dump it.

• Instead of typing, printing, stuffing and mailing anotherletter, use e-mail. You'll spend less time composing themessage, and the recipient can respond quickly and easily (plusyour postage bills will go down). Take the time to clear out olde-mail messages you won't refer to again, and avoid thetemptation to print out e-mail messages. Keep important messagesstored electronically.

• Before you renew another magazine subscription, find outwhether the publication is available online or on a CD. When youneed to refer to an article, you'll save time by being able tosearch your computer or CDs for an article stored by name, ratherthan pouring over past paper issues looking for the same article.In addition, you'll no longer waste valuable space in youroffice storing stacks of magazines.

Home office expert Lisa Kanarek is the founder of HomeOfficeLife.com and theauthor of Organizing Your Home Office For Success (BlakelyPress) and 101 Home Office Success Secrets (CareerPress).