Going Paperless

A couple of months ago, my wife and I took upon ourselves to move our paper clutter to the computer. We have accumulated over the past decade and a half all sorts of documents, which we annually or semi-annually go over, throw 30%, ‘sort’ 30%, and the rest stays jumbled till next time.

We never agreed on how to sort the papers – I devised a way to utilize a drawer cabinet with labeled drawers, having one marked ‘to-do’, and the rest marked ‘salaries’, ‘his’, ‘hers’, etc. My wife loathed the cabinet, and kept stuffing papers in the wrong drawers – making the whole cabinet a ‘black-hole’ for papers that will never be found. The sorriest drawer off all was the ‘to-do’ drawer – where coupons and bills were left to expire…
My wife’s method was to sort the papers into ring binders, each having multiple labeled sheet-protectors, for each category. This method is a classic, and works perfectly for paperwork assigned to our accountant, but in the house-hold paperwork it has some interesting draw-backs. For example – the proliferation of ‘categories’ – ‘Warranties’, ‘Car Insurance’, ‘Printer’, ‘Home Theater System’ (how many papers go into that one?), etc. So, in the end of the day – where did we put the warranty for our Home Theater System?
Another issue was material fatigue – the more a category was well-used, so was the sheet-protector, which meant it would crumble, and you will find yourself holding an empty binder surrounded by formerly sorted paperwork…

I’ve made some experiments with scanning incoming documents in the past (I’ve recently found 8-year old images of documents scanned in such an experiment). The main problems I’ve encountered is that although scanners became ubiquitous when printers gave way to ‘integrated printers’, combining them with fax machines and scanners, these home scanners are dead slow, each page taking more than a minute to process (placing it on the scanner face, previewing it, scanning, saving, turning it over…), so it makes the whole procedure cumbersome when employing it on a daily basis, and impossible when trying to process a backlog. Furthermore, each scanned page takes from hundred of Ks to 4 Megs (if done with the scanner’s BMP default). I’ve also played with OCR, and was disappointed, especially since most of our real-life paperwork is not in English (yes, there are parts of the world where papers are in other languages…)
My renewed interest in scanning documents appeared when I’ve come across an IPhone application called ‘Cam Scanner’, whose premise is to take a picture of your document, which is then processed for high contrast and warped into a rectangle shape, making it ready to send to your repository, only a couple of tens of K in size, and quite readable.
This is great! Now you can add newly arrived documents to your repository in an (almost) point and shoot procedure. But what about the decade of backlog? Working on thousands of documents one at a time gets old real fast, and is in no way practical.

Rent a scanner

You can buy an industrial scanner, which starts at a few hundreds of dollars for small ones, which won’t be enough for the backlog project, AND be an overkill for any future daily procedure.

So what we did was rent a scanner. We found a small business that  rents out scanners on a weekly or monthly basis (http://www.rentascanner.co.il for local readers).
We rented a small Fujitsu scanner, which can handle up to 50 pages in its feeder, and takes less than a minute to eat them all up, and give you 4 images per page (front+back*b/w+color).
The owner of the rent-a-scanner was a bit surprised by having us as customers, being more familiar with small businesses as his clients, but he was appeased by seeing me as a ‘computer-savvy’ type, who will take good care of his hardware.
My father-in-law loaned us a small paper shredder, and we were set.
So now, we have a week to scan all our papers. We cleared a weekend for ourselves, sent to kids to their grandparents, and went to work…

Collect

First, clear out a big space in your living room. Doing it in the living room considerably lowers the possibility for leaving things ‘in the middle’.
Now, go over all the rooms in the house, in every drawer, table top, cabinet, etc. take all the paper you can find, and dump it all in a big heap in the middle of your allotted location.

Sort papers

Scan then shred

Scan and Shred