You walk into your home office and instead of finding it a relaxing place to work, you’re unsettled by the piles of paper you can’t bring yourself to throw out. You would love to wheel in a huge recycling bin, and shovel all that paper away. But you’re certain there’s valuable information in that mess – whether it’s your note for that million dollar invention or an idea for that great book you’ve always wanted to write.
Despite the dream of the paperless home office, we’re still surrounded by paper. Over the years I’ve tried many ways to follow that dream. I bought the combined printer / scanner and tediously loaded page by page into the scanner, saving it to the computer. That took too long. I’ve also used industrial strength photocopiers to scan material, but often that produces files too large to email.
3 big advantages I discovered of the paperless home office
Over the period of scanning materials and then referring to them, here are 3 advantages I noticed right away:
- Reduced clutter: I literally filled a recycling bin with the paper I scanned in a day. This removed clutter from desks around the house and improved storage space.
- Fast find: by labeling every file with a relevant name, I can use the computer ‘search function’ to quickly find relevant materials. That’s far simpler than sifting through drawers of loose paper when I need to locate an important file.
- Anywhere access: If you backup your files to a cloud service, this will mean you can access your files whenever you need them (from a PC, tablet or smartphone).
What to scan…
While you can use these types of products to scan anything on paper, knowing where to start is helpful.
Materials I scanned, then recycled the paper
In a single day I scanned through the bulk of these materials:
■ Handwritten Notes: I enjoy drawing flow diagrams and ideas on plain paper, the back of envelopes and occasionally the old napkin. I scanned all of these (even the napkins).
■ Professional Development: during the last 10 years I’ve completed about 10 professional development courses (usually 2 to 3 days each). I’ve collected all of my notes from these courses.
■ Assignments: any university assignments I had submitted which had been marked.
■ Study References: previous articles and workbooks given to me as part of university courses.
■ Personal Profiles: In most careers at one time or another you’re asked to participate in a profiling tool. Myers Briggs, DISC, HBDI, or general 360 degree surveys are a few examples. These profiles provide a useful window to reflect on your own development over time. I had a pile of these which have now all been scanned.
■ Receipts*: I really only keep the big ones, for items useful at tax time or for warranty purposes.
Materials I scanned, and kept the paper reference
Some files are worth scanning just for the sake of having a backup, though the intent is to keep the paper copy. In this category I place items like:
■ Certificates: any recently received awards or certificates, such as university graduations.
■ Academic transcripts: these include any official transcripts from university. However, I even found a few teacher’s notes from primary school (how great to have these on file!).
■ Family photos: though we usually retrieve photos from Facebook these days, I had many photos only available as hard copy. I scanned these at high resolution.
■ Useful identity documents*: documents which are important for me to have in the event I lose my wallet (eg. drivers license).
■ Some contracts: any previous contracts worth holding onto (eg. gym membership, mobile plans, rental agreements, loan agreements, etc).
My approach
Recently I bought The Fujitsu Scan Snap and have to say this product has produced a storage and productivity victory. Now, there are lots of these types of products on the market. I will write of the Scan Snap purely because that’s the one I bought.
Here’s some of the features that make this product great. It is:
■ Compact: the product sits neatly in the corner of the room and folds up into a small, elegant and unobtrusive package.
■ Fast: it scans around 50 pages a minute (doing both sides at the same time). The first time I used it I was instantly impressed with its speed.
■ Multiple outputs: it will output to a variety of formats depending on the setting you choose; for me, the most useful are PDFs and JPEGs.
■ Cloud compatible: the software provided makes it simple to output scans to cloud services, such as Drop Box or Evernote with just a click of a button.
*A note on data sensitivity
Some data is sensitive, such as financial records (eg. tax returns) or health information (eg. medical records). While it is becoming increasingly common for people to scan and backup these types of materials to cloud services, the choice whether or not to do so is a personal one. Over the last 12 months there have been examples where supposedly “secure” sites have been compromised, providing 3rd parties access to private data. So, I recommend if backing up to a cloud service, select a provider that is reliable, financially secure and has strong record when it comes to data security.
– End
Images:
flickr.com/photos/wicker-furniture/8494838233/sizes/o/in/photostream, Wickerfurniture
