When your income depends on how productive you are, it’s easy to think of filing and related tasks as non-essentials. But if it gets bad enough, not being organized actually can hurt your productivity.

Today I’ve invited freelancer writer and frugal living expert Leah Ingram to share a guest post on getting organized. Her advice on cutting out clutter by updating office equipment comes from her new book, Toss Keep Sell! The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In, published recently by Adams Media. You can find out more about Leah on her website or her Suddenly Frugal blog.

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Does your home office have equipment overload? Mine used to.

If you’d popped into my home office last year, along with my Mac Book laptop, you would have found the following:

• Color inkjet printer
• Color inkjet printer, copier, and scanner
• Black-and-white laser printer
• Desktop copier
• Fax machine

Sounds like I was all set from a printing, copying, and scanning perspective, right? Well, yes and no. Sure, I had all the technology I needed to make color and black-and-white copies, to scan documents and photographs, send photos, and print out e-mails and manuscripts. But there were two reasons that this set up didn’t benefit me from an organizational and financial point of view; I spent:

• A lot of time switching back and forth between pieces of equipment, depending on the task I needed to complete
• A lot of money buying supplies for each printer, copier, fax machine, and all-in-one machine

Not only was having a lot of equipment sucking up my time, it was sucking up my money, too.

While a handful of the machines I was using came free with a past purchase of a computer, they were each expensive to maintain. Here’s a cost rundown of some of them:

Color inkjet printer and printer/scanner/copier: replacement cartridges cost about $35 each—a color cartridge and a black-and-white cartridge were necessary for both—and needed to be replaced every three months

• Copy machine: toner drum/cartridge cost $100 to replace. I needed to buy a new one every other year
• Laser printer: laser cartridge cost $80 to replace; it ran out of toner about once a year.

Oh, and did I mention that each of these machines took different print cartridges? That meant that I couldn’t stockpile any one kind of ink, printer, or toner cartridge when it was on sale (like I might groceries for my pantry) and then use it in all my machines. No, I had to buy them all separately.

Needless to say, in the course of the year, I was spending about $300 just to keep up my ink supply. Who wants to spend that kind of money, especially if this way of working isn’t time efficient? And then there’s the desktop clutter of having so many machines.

That’s why this past year I decided to streamline my office machines into one: I got a high-efficiency desktop printer that’s also a copier (color and black and white), scanner, and fax machine. I bought it on Black Friday and spent less for it than I did all of last year buying ink. Now if I need to replace ink, I only have to spend once but I still get the functionality of my four-in-one.

My plan this year is to sell those machines for extra cash, either on Craigslist or Gazelle.com If none of that works out, I’ll donate them to a non-profit and take the tax write-off—assuming my accountant says that’s kosher.

Copyright 2011 Leah Ingram. Reprinted with permission from Toss Keep Sell! The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In (Adams Media, 2010).

Face it, getting rid of paper completely won’t happen. It’s too big a part of our lives. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be as big a part. It’s like going on a diet. You don’t cut out food entirely, just decrease the portions. That’s how energy researcher Bruce Nordman, with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, put it when I interviewed him recently for my story on reducing use of office paper for IncTechnology.com.

Since last fall, I’ve been on a mission to reduce my own paper consumption. I have a practical reason and a philosophical one. On the practical side, I have one two-drawer file cabinet in my office for tax records, important papers and work files. The less work-related paper I generate, the more room I have for receipts and tax forms. On the philosophical side, I’m trying to reduce, recycle and reuse all kinds of things, and cutting back on paper fits into that.

Here are my top 5 ways writers and home-based workers can go paperless:

1. Ditch the scratch pad – I’ve always been a major list maker. Now I put daily and other to-do lists in the Tasks section of Outlook. The program’s Notes section is good for keeping track of books I want to read, ideas for birthday presents and my resume. If you don’t like Outlook, there are plenty of Web-based applications like it, such as Google Notebook.

2. Mark up story notes on screen. I’m embarrassed to admit I just started using the highlighter feature on Word. It makes it easy to do the same kind of mark up on notes that I used to do with a paper print out and yellow highlighter pen. When I write, I use the split screen feature of Windows to open my notes file and my story file at the same time.

3. Use a bookmark service for research. Del.icio.us, the social bookmark service, is great for tracking information for stories or other research. It’s easy to use. Sign up, find sites you want to save, tag them with key words, then use the tags to sort through what you’ve saved.

4. Ask collaborators to use Track Changes. This feature of Word is standard operating procedure for most writers and editors, but it’s amazing how many other people don’t use it or even know that it’s there.

5. When you have to use a printer, do it judiciously. Some things you have to print. When you do, print to both sides of a piece of paper. Set printer controls to print out multiple pages per sheet of paper. Set printers so they won’t print out test pages when they’re turned on. If you use company letterhead, create a Word template you can be print out as needed.

You can find more tips for eliminating office paper at a Website energy researcher Bruce Nordman created 10 years ago called Cutting Paper. The information hasn’t been updated for a while, but Nordman promises it’s still valid. And he’s looking for some green-souled individual or group to take over running it. Interested? Drop him a line at the lab.