victor’s solution to drowning in paper

I’ve found myself drowning under a sea of paper the last copule of months. It’s pretty shocking how much paper we get at our house - in just the last 2 weeks, there’s been:

• bank statements
• credit card statements
• insurance documents
• mortgage documents
• contracts for work
• articles from magazines i wanted to keep
• piles of receipts for taxes

It piles up fast.

I finally bit the bullet and settled on a document management system.

Enter - the Fujitsu S510m.

I make no bones about saying that most things are poorly thought out and the general suck factor is pretty high, but the S510m is very very far from that.

It’s fucking brilliant.

This little scanner will do 18 pages per minute, double sided, in color - and you push just one button. Out pop PDFs, all OCR’d up thanks to ABBY FineReader and bobs your uncle. Shred or recycle your documents when you’re done.

Wooo!

I went whole hog actually - got myself a copy of DevonThink to act as a document database - well worth it.

What DT gives me now is a way to discover relationships to documents that I might not recognize or have forgotten.

Example - I scanned and stored my Energuide home assessment from a couple years ago, there’s stuff in that report that I know I want to get around to, but we just haven’t had the time.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

That’s DevonThink showing me all the related documents - not perfect - I’m not sure what Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer programming have to do with home renovation, but that’s not bad at all.

So after just 4 days - I’ve managed to go through and purge a garbage bag and a half of paper. Most of it recycled, some of it shredded and destroyed, but it’s all good.

Truthfully - not all of it was scanned, but having a scanner that makes capturing information so completely effortless got rid of any hesitation I had for going through all my ’stuff’. There’s no way in hell I would have done this with a regular flatbed scanner. The difference between 18 pages per minute (36 if you count both sides) and a plain flat bed scanner is night and day.

The only downside so far has been that it’s forced me to get a real backup solution for home. A real backup solution.

More on that later.

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