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I must admit, I’m a big fan of unclutterer.com.  The shiny clean offices, organized cables under the desk, color coordinated boxes to hold every misguided purchase, and the endless stream of information that calls out that I’m a complete failure at getting my “stuff” in order.  I buy things to organized, and then I find myself just as unorganized, but with an excessive amount of organizational supplies.  So last year I decided to tackle the most unwieldy beast that darkens our doorstep each day - the mailman ( or woman depending on the day.)

Here’s how this story unfolds.  I get the mail, check it for interesting items; cards, checks, letters from old friends, etc.  Since none of those things are never there, the mail goes where it always goes - the pile.  You know the pile, don’t you?  It’s the stack at the edge of your desk or maybe your kitchen counter.  The pile that tends to spread like amoeba dividing before you take action which usually involves paper cuts, a shredder, and several hours.  I’m here to tell you, there is a better way.

Let’s take a quick look at your mail and determine what’s in there.  If you are in a major ad market, chances are good that at least one day a week, it will look like someone stuffed a whole newspaper worth of ads in your mailbox.  The annoying part is having to sift through it to make sure your mail didn’t slip in between the pages before you toss it in the recycle bin (you do recycle don’t you?)

The rest of my mail for the past 3 days consists of the following:

1. Credit card offer

2. Newsletter from St. Joseph’s Hospital where I had my boo boo fixed

3. Newsletter from Cigna Health Care

4. AAA Membership offer

5. Mortgage Statement

6. Refinance Offer

7. Time share vacation to Mexico (no vacation is worth the presentation)

8. Insurance offer from Mortgage company (how convenient for them)

9. Frequent Flyer Miles Statement

10. Subscription offer to the Economist

That was just three days worth of mail, so if my mail was consistent and all things were equal, I would be left with 100 envelopes to open by the end of the month.   Of course most of that gets tossed, but what about the stuff I want to keep?  That list is a little more regular and goes something like this:

1. Mortgage bill

2. Phone bill

3. Cell Phone Bill

4. Power

5. Water, Sewer and Trash

6. Gas

7. Cable/Internet

8. Bank Statement (3)

9. Retirement Account Statement

That’s 108 envelopes per year not including the other “Important” documents like loan papers, property tax statements, or other miscellaneous documents you want to save.  If each one only contained 3 sheets of paper, that would be 324 sheets of paper that you need to do something with each year.  If you keep records around for 5 years, that’s 1,620 pages that will be clogging your home office, kitchen, entry way, or wherever your paper mess accumulates.   

Now if you were awake for my intro, you might guess that I suck at filing, and that’s true,  but that doesn’t mean I still have a mess and can’t find important documents - no, now I have a plan. 

 It all starts with making up your mind that paper is not as necessary as it once was.  Let’ face it, you won’t be defending a class action law suit based on your water bill and most companies will produce a duplicate copy upon request, so give me one good reason that it should not be destine for the shredder?  Think about it, when was the last time you went back through your bills.  I’m not sure I ever have.     

 So paper is bad. Got it? Good.  Now you need to realize that record keeping need not be sacrificed.  I employed technology to get the upper hand on our pulp produced mess.  Here’s how the system goes: 

1. Mail is pulled from slot and sorted. Junk mail that is deemed to be non-sensitive is deposited directly into a small recycle bin next to the mail slot in the house.

2. Sensitive, unimportant mail (credit card offers) are redirected to the shredder.

3. Important items that require action are set next to my computer for online bill pay and scanning.

4. Important items that are not time sensitive are group into one stack for scanning.

Yes I said scanning.  I searched high and low for a good document management solution and was always left feeling a bit burdened by the technology, so I decided to set out on my own and adapt my own plan.

My system centers around a Brother MFC-8860DN multi function copy, scan, print, fax device.  I’m not particularly tied to this unit; it just happened to be on sale for $399 at Costco and had the features I need.  What features you ask?

First, I insisted on a duplex scanner which will limit your options right off the bat.  I know that if I had to scan, turn , then scan.  I would give up on the process and I would have a multi function unit and the same mess I started with.  The MFC-8860DN happened to fit the bill and it also had Windows Vista drivers which were limited at the time.

Second , the scanner needed a document feeder.  No way would l sit at the scanner placing the documents on the glass. Who has that much time?

The third feature that was important was the ability to attach the device to a network.  The MFC-8860D comes equipped with a Ethernet connection (RJ45) to attach to your network.  They also sell a wireless module for those who want wire free operation.  Network compatibility allows two things:  first, to get the scanner away from the desktop.  This lets multiple people access it without tripping over the user in one workstation.  The second benefit is that it allows multiple network users to scan from a central scanner to their computer.  This means Liz can scan her important documents from her laptop, and I can scan mine from my desktop or laptop.  

The Brother software that came with the scanner is fully configurable.  We have settings for scanning single sided, duplex, and legal size pages.  Documents are scanned to a PDF file on the network called paperless.  These files are images of the original that can be printed back out in the original’s glory.  Our settings open the paperless directory automatically where we can verify that scans took place successfully.  Once we are convinced that the file was recorded, the scanned pages are off to the shredder.

But anyone who has a collection of images on their computer knows that finding an image at some point in the future, well, that’s a different task all together.  For that, we need a bit more ingenuity.

For this we turn to Adobe and the features of Acrobat 8 Professional which comes as part of CS3 suite.  Beside the feeling of dread when you click on a PFD link on the web, Acrobat should usher in a general feeling of control when it comes to document management.  Adobe comes equipped with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which is not new, but it is incredibly convenient to be able to do the OCR in the native format for you data files.  You can access this option by opening a document that you wish to scan, then selecting document from the main menu followed by OCR Text Recognition, Recognize Text Using OCR…  the software will go through several gyrations and spit out a document that looks largely the same as the one before.  The difference being that you can now select the text with your cursor and the program will be able to search on words.

If you were following along with the steps above, you must be thinking that this will be an incredible pain in the butt to administer if you need to do this document by document. Ahhh, but there is a better way.  Under the Advanced menu Adobe gave us the gift of batch processing.  Located under the Document Processing menu the Batch processing option allows you to create a script that will carry out the functions of OCR for you.  This will allow you to churn through a large directory of files in a matter of minutes.

I tend to run the OCR job every few months on the paperless folder then move the OCR files into directories that make logical sense such as bills, receipts, articles, manuals, etc. The manuals file alone saves me a ton of space.  When you buy a new product, chances are they already have a PDF of the manual on their website.  Just download it to your document library and throw the manual in the recycle bin.  Besides, if you’re like me, you won’t read it anyway.   I also keep an ideas folder that is just for things that inspire me.  You know, that someday file of things you want to make, or buy or design, etc.

Once you have PDF files that are indexed with ORC words, you now can let your operating system’s search engine (Mac or Vista) take over. If you are using other operating systems, you may need to employ a desktop search feature like Google’s Desktop search.  Whatever tool you use, once the files are indexed, you are able to type in keywords to get to your scanned documents - all of them.    

So for me, this workflow has been a godsend.  Not that we don’t have some paper around, but we have reduced it significantly.  We get by on one filing cabinet instead of adding another and are able to locate documents readily without digging through files.   In wrapping this up, I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest that you have a good backup strategy before pursuing this path.  We have a Windows Home Server that all systems backup to and I’m looking into an online backup solution as well.  If anyone out there has an idea of a good choice, please post some comments.  That goes for anyone who has a better paperless solution - ours is far from perfect.  

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