I did something unconscionable last week. Something I swore I would never, ever do again. Something that, quite frankly, cut against the core of my very being. I made a decision that represented a complete failure of principle, a black mark on a belief system that I've nurtured for years.
I bought a new file cabinet. You read that correctly: Mr. Technology, Señor Supernerd, The Dean of Digital, the – well you get the point. I'm a firm believer in the digitization of everything. Sure, I have an old-fashioned bone or two in me; I’ve still got a pretty mean vinyl collection and I love a good printed book.
But when it comes to work, I've always preached: "Give me paperless or give me death." Get the invoices, the receipts, the tax forms and every other miscellaneous piece of random printed information off my desk and into the computer. Scan it, organize it, make it searchable and then take the original and shred it. It's not really a "save the earth" kinda thing because, well, these are mostly things that have already been printed by someone else and handed or mailed to me. It's more about getting rid of physical and mental clutter, and making things easier to find.
And honestly, it mostly works. I have a cool little document scanner (like those ones they use at the doctor's office now to run your insurance stuff through) on my desk and it processes documents in a flash. All that stuff goes onto my hard drive or Dropbox (a cloud file storage service) or gets filed into Evernote, which organizes and catalogs scanned documents (along with any other type of content you want to throw at it). It's a pretty tight, reasonably bulletproof system for filing stuff away and finding it later.
What Went Wrong?
What on earth prompted me to go out and buy a file cabinet?
Well, let’s be clear about one thing: This is not one of those four or five-drawer putty-colored monstrosities that you have to wheel around on a hand truck when you need to move offices. This is one drawer, and I didn't even fill it up halfway. But it still represents something of a failure of the paperless dream.
How did this happen?
It began with an innocuously-labeled (physical) folder on my (physical) desktop. It reads, simply, "TO SCAN" on the tab. Pretty basic and straightforward; not something that you'd think would hound me like Poe's telltale heart. But hound me it did, growing slowly in thickness as I added receipts, invoices, letters and documents to it that I didn't have time to run through my trusty ScanSnap.
The pale blue demon (that’s the color of the folder, in case you're wondering) stared back at me as it grew, mocking my best intentions of organizational efficiency, like an email inbox with 10,000 unread messages or a to-do list with no checkmarks on it. I'd take a Saturday here and there to chip away at it, reducing it to a mere fraction of its bulging waistline, but a few hours in I'd give up, leaving a stray receipt or two in there, promising to tackle it again "next time." Always next time.
It seemed that I could never completely get through it. There are, of course, plenty of things like that in life: I periodically clear out my email inbox only to have it fill up again. No sooner do I finish laundry or dishes than new dirty clothes or saucers are made. Yet I'm able to take those things in stride, to accept them as part of the normal cycle of life. The paperless struggle proved to be uniquely frustrating.
Why? First of all, I think it's because I don't really get reams of new documents to scan every day. In fact, I often get none; I may go days without anything to scan. So it seems like it should be manageable – I’m not running a county tax office here.
Second, scanning is really easy. Emails take time to respond to; dishes have to be washed. But scanning is brainless and fast – you just stick it in and hit the button. There’s not much reason to put it off. In fact, putting it off really defeats the purpose of buying a fast, easy-to-use document scanner. If you're going to do everything in bulk, speed and convenience are much less important (in fact, there are services like Shoeboxed (shoeboxed.com) that you can ship a big envelope of stuff to and they’ll do it for you). The point of having a really fast document scanner on your desktop is to scan the moment you get the document (like they do at the doctor’s office) and get it over with.
Making it WorkAnd that’s where I failed, primarily. I didn't scan things as they came in, so scanning itself became a chore, rather than a convenience. If you plan on buying a fancy document scanner (and I still think you should, as you'll see in a just a minute), then you should always try to process those documents the moment they cross your desk. Getting in that habit will make your life much easier.
How do you go paperless successfully? First, get a good document scanner – Fujitsu makes the best desktop ones, and they include OCR (optical character recognition) software so that your scanned documents are searchable by your computer. When you see what these scanners do, you'll be amazed. Even handwritten notes and poorly printed text can often be recognized. The first time you go search for "paint color" and see a handwritten note you scanned months ago with the words highlighted, you'll think tiny gremlins are working inside the scanner. It's like magic.
Second, (yes, I’m repeating myself) scan as soon as you get something! Don’t let scanning become yet another overflowing inbox. Make it a habit. It only takes a few seconds to scan something, and freeing your brain from the mental baggage of another document to scan is huge. (That said, this rule can be bent a little; if you want to scan at the end of the day, or on some frequent schedule, that's fine – but keep it consistent! Don't let it pile up.)
But I want to let you in on another realization that I had – there are still a few things that are fine to file away as physical copies. I know, I know – heresy! But the reality is that certain tax receipts, corporate filings, mortgage documents and other important pieces of paper actually seem to be better suited for a physical folder than a digital file on your computer. That's not to say that I don't have many of those in both places – I might scan a tax document and keep it, for instance. But I have neither the time nor the inclination to unstaple and scan the Bible-thick sheaf of closing documents from the last refinance on our house. And I don't want to toss it just yet. In the end, it's not truly paperless – it's just much less "paperful."
Thus the file cabinet. It’s a nice one, with a pretty white finish and chrome handles. It holds everything I need it to hold, and I can keep some dog treats in there too for when the pooch sits down and actually chills out. Of course, in perhaps the ultimate twist of irony, the folder at the very front of the drawer is my old light blue nemesis, still labeled "TO SCAN."
Brent Buford is a co-founder of eBlox, a Tucson, AZ and Austin, TX-based web development firm. He can be reached at brent@eblox.com.