Last time in this column, I shared with you a little tip for keeping yourself from being buried under a mountain of mail. It was a simple, little process that I call “scan and shred.” To recap: take your incoming mail, scan it into a folder structure that lives on a cloud drive, and shred the original. The net result is that your hardcopy life is on its way to becoming digitized.

I want to expound on my system a little and take it on the road.

The smartphones that many of us carry around nowadays probably have more computing power than the systems that carried the astronauts to the moon. With the right apps installed on them, they can carry your organized life to infinity and beyond.

If you are applying my “scan and shred” method then there are two apps you need to make this a really robust system: Dropbox and Evernote.

Dropbox for your phone works just like Dropbox for your desktop — it is cloud-based storage, i.e., you can open and edit your documents wherever you have an Internet connection to sync the folder. Believe me, having this functionality can be a real lifesaver. Because you’ve followed my advice and will already have been scanning documents into your