Since I got my new toy and figured out all the software quirks (I needed to upgrade my OS since the software wasn't compatible with lion so now I'm mountain lion), I have been converting our house to paperless at an astounding rate. I've done about 95% of my filing.
Upon my enthusiasm for making so much progress so fast, RHG said, "But now you have to organize them all." That's the beauty people - not really. See what I did was this:
- scan - scanned in batches of paper from my paper filing system which was already pretty organized.
- name - after each batch was done scanning, I gave it a name with keywords that I would likely search on. For example, invoices for my car are name "car honda service invoices." Sometimes I included the date in the file if it was relevant.
- file - I dumped those PDFs into one folder. I'm done with creating a bunch of folders for different topics. I rely almost exclusively on the spotlight search to find files, so why file them? It was a hard habit to break from my early days of computing where every file was organized in folder upon folder. Now I use some folders, but very few.
- create searchability - Of course, you can't search the contents of a PDF, which I'd like to do. So now I'm doing batch processing to get all the PDFs OCRd. OCR = optical character recognition. In laymen's terms, OCRing a PDF makes the contents searchable (at least the parts that are in typeface).
It feels so good to have all this paper that was just sitting there taking up space gone. I actually looked forward to getting the snail mail today. I normally avoid it because it's just.more.paper. Argh! Now I can immediately process the paper and recycle it. Woohoo!
This has seriously made me so happy. Every time I'd read reviews for the scansnap on various organization sites, they would absolutely rave about it. I figured how great could it possibly be? It's a scanner. Big whoop. Well, it's so awesome because it's like the people who designed it knew exactly what their target market wanted!
What I have now done is freed up an entire filing drawer. To do what with you ask? Store my fabric!
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| Image and idea from Sew Many Ways |
That's my next project ... after I'm done scanning every scrap of paper in this house and chucking it. And yes, I am doing periodic data backups.
Avery's itinerary today
- school
- buy new leotard for dance since I screwed up and bought a purple one and pink is required for her new dance classes
- go to our feelings helper (this is a subject of a future post - when I feel like it)
- go to theater class
- dinner & frozen yogurt
- home
Tomorrow is just as busy.
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