Taking Control of the Paper Monster

I think Meredith’s previous post about productivity gimmicks was right on the money. Strolling though the aisles at Staples I see so many devices and notions to help people organize, I can’t help but wonder if people ever get real work done.

My own system for keeping organized has evolved over the past couple of years. Between running a company and being responsible for all the household paperwork since moving to Vermont, my desk became a blizzard of papers, bills, half-eaten sandwiches, and old coffee cups. Not good.

The organizational system that I’ve developed works on two core assumptions:

Assumption #1: I’m lazy. Very, very lazy. If any step takes more than a couple of minutes, it won’t get done.

Assumption #2: Paper is bad. A few pieces of loose paper on my desk is the first step toward chaos. So the goal is to do something with the paper before it piles up and buries me.

The Tech
My system involves a little bit of technology to work:

• An inbox on my desk for papers
• A Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 – a high-speed document scanner
• FineReader for ScanScap – an OCR program that’s bundled with the ScanSnap.
• Yep, a program that lets you tag PDFs and visually preview them

The Workflow

1. Triage
When I get a new piece of mail, i categorize it in one of two ways:
A) Mail that needs a physical response (ie, bills that I can’t pay online, quarterly taxes, etc.. all documents that will require me to deal with a stamp, envelope and the mailman.)
B) Mail that just needs to be filed and/or dealt with online (bank statements, merchant account statements, credit card statements that I pay online, etc…)

If something falls into pile “A”, i do it immediately, or as soon as possible. This keeps clutter to a minimum and ensures that our heat doesn’t get turned off. Once everything from pile A is finished, it gets dumped in with pile B, to be scanned…

2. Scanning
This is the critical step. The Fujitsu ScanSnap is a high-speed scanner — it can do 18 double-sided pages a minute. It scans with the single press of a button, then automatically turns the scan into a PDF and places it into a directory you specify before-hand.

It is one of the most useful pieces of business equipment I’ve ever used; i was able to scan my archive of 5,000+ documents in <2 days. The "M" version of the scanner is bundled with software for OS X, and it works very well indeed.

This video just shows you how quickly it performs the scans.

Keeping up with scanning my incoming mail requires only 1-2 minutes a day.

I set up 4 different directories for the scans (you'll see why in a minute):

• New
• OCR In Process
• OCR Finished
• Tagged

The ScanSnap puts all new scans immediately into the New directory. It automatically names the files based on the date and time of the scan. (ie, “2008_09_24_16_58_41.pdf”). This behavior can be configured.

3. Dispose of the Paper!
According to the IRS, you can apparently shred or otherwise dispose of paper documents that you’ve digitized, including receipts. I tend to err on the side of caution though, and don’t mind keeping paper for at least a couple of years as long as I don’t have to see it. So for those few documents I can’t bear to shred, I just file them into a plain old cabinet.

My assumption is that I won’t ever have to actually look through those papers, so my filing system isn’t very complicated: throw them in a drawer, forget they exist.

4. OCR: making the scanned documents searchable
About once a week, i’ll go through the “New” folder where all the new scans are placed, and drag the entire folder’s contents into the “OCR In Process” folder. I then take all the files and pass them through the FineReader OCR program.

This program, bundled with the ScanSnap, makes all the texts in the PDFs searchable by spotlight and other search programs.

The reason you shouldn’t run an OCR program at the time that you’re doing the scans is because OCR can take a long time, even with a fast machine. It can take my Macbook Pro up to a minute to perform an OCR scan on a particularly tough document. So it is best to take all your new documents once a week and do all the OCR in a batch, and just let it run in the background while you do other things. FineReader is good about not hogging the CPU, and won’t slow down other programs while it does its thing.

5. Tagging and Searching with Yep
Once the OCR is done, i move the scanned files from “OCR in Process” To “OCR Finished”. I then fire up Yep.

Yep describes itself as an “iPhoto for your PDFs”, which is a fairly accurate description. It lets you easily tag each document and perform very rapid searches. Once you start using Yep (or something like it) you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it.

Yep has a few critical benefits that I didn’t see in other similar programs:
A) It is cheap – $34.00. Free demo available too.
B) It doesn’t use proprietary tags; Any tags that you create get placed into OS X’s Spotlight database. Not using some funky, proprietary database but instead embedding the tags into the PDF’s metadata means that getting locked-in is much less of a concern.
C) it doesn’t move the PDF files around — it can find them anywhere on your hard drive (or even over a network), so you don’t have to muck around with maintaining pristine directories or even having logical filenames. If you can devise a good tagging system, you can find just about any file in an instant regardless of where it located on the hard drive, or what it is called. This is beneficial for the lazy and disorganized.

A Concrete Example: My Electricity Bill.

Tagging:
After scanning in a document, Yep automatically sees that there’s a new, untagged PDF. To tag it, you just click on the file and start typing in the tags you want. Here’s an example video of me tagging my electric bill in Yep, just to give you a sense of how quickly you can get it done.

Video: Tagging my electricity bill with Yep

Searching:
Tagging would be useless if you didn’t have a fast facility to retrieve the document. Fortunately, Yep takes full advantage of the search capabilities offered by OS X.

This video shows you how quickly you can pull up documents by tags. In this case, i’m searching for the electric bill that I just tagged. As you select tags, Yep narrows down the search parameters by only looking for the tags that remain in your sub-selection. This makes finding any document incredibly easy.

Video: Finding my electricity bill with Yep

6. Backups
Now that your entire financial life has been digitized, it is critically important that you make secure, reliable backups. (In fact, the IRS insists upon it if you are going to shred the original paper documents.) I’ll get into my backup technique in a future post.

Good luck taming your own paper monster…

Tags: adam, finereader, IRS, OCR, paper monster, productivity, scansnap, yep