Man Paperwork sucks
Last week I looked around the house, and noticed all of the important papers that were just lying around the house, on the couch, on the floor, between the cushions of the couch, in the cat's play area, on the computer table, and none of it in the filing cabinet that we had bought. I won't say that I'm a neat freak, never have been, but the amount of paperwork that was just lying around really bothered me. There have been times when we needed a certain piece of paperwork, but to find it we had to turn the house upside-down.
Okay, the house needs cleaned, and organized, that much is obvious. Now how would any good computer geek proceed in doing that? I had no idea, till I finished my tax paperwork and wanted to make a copy - I used my scanner to make a copy. Eureka! I would scan all of the paperwork into the computer, and save it that way - easy to organize, file, and search. The best part is that once I get everything scanned, most of it can then be shredded - saving me space.
I don't exactly have the most amazing equipment to be scanning. I have a Lexmark printer/flat bed scanner, a desktop running WinXP (30Gig HDD, and 128 memory), and the only software that I have is what came bundled with the Lexmark and Windows.
Before I started, I did a search for others who had done this same thing, going paperless, I found articles and blog posts. Two things seemed to be common, almost each person complained of what a huge task it was going to be, it would take all day or longer, and almost each person had a document feed scanner, not a flat bed scanner. I can't help what scanner or software I have right now, but I think I could do better than scanning a huge amount of paperwork at once, and making myself sick of the project right from the beginning - so I set up a process in how I was going to scan the paperwork, in hopes that I would not get sick of the project so quickly.
The process
The process that I setup is rather simple, and is designed to be used over a long period of time.
First thing is first, scan the paperwork that managed to make it into the filing cabinet, get that out of the way first. I moved all of the paperwork in the filing cabinet to the front, then as it was scanned, it was refiled. Next, I will gather all of the loose paperwork in the house into one spot, and will sort it into three piles (Recycle, Shred, Scan).
Recycle:
Anything that is not of a sensitive nature, and doesn't need to be kept will be placed into the recycling bin right away, there goes a quarter of the stack.
Shred:
Anything that is of a sensitive nature, but doesn't need to be kept, will be put in a box of stuff that needs to be shredded. I will explain what I do with that stuff later. There goes about half of the remaining pile.
Scan:
This is everything else, the stuff that needs to be kept, if it is of a sensitive nature or not. This gets placed into a pile near the scanner.
I have no incentive to complete this project quickly, but I do want to see some progress as I go. So I decided to make sure that I scanned at least five pages each work day, along with anything new that comes in.
As each page is scanned I decide if I should put it in the shred box, filing cabinet, or directly into the recycle bin. I spend about 10 - 15 minutes scanning pages (depending on if the pages are front and back, or just front, black and white, or color) each day. I know that seems like a long time for only a few pages a day, but I have to set and reset each page, and the software is not exactly automated. As each page is scanned, I will take a collection of pages from the shred box, and shred them - I get as many done as I can while I'm scanning.
Each scanned document is saved as a PDF file.
The largest problem that I'm having is deciding where to backup the files once I'm done. I'm thinking that Amazon's S3 service could be good for this, but I don't have internet access at home. I have a portable drive, but that has the difficulty of not being stored off site. Right now I'm thinking that I will have to do a combination of the two, keep a copy on the portable drive, and upload a copy to the internet when I'm at work.
I still haven't perfected my process yet, so if anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to share.
