June 21, 2006 – 3:15 pm
Up until about a year ago, my house was covered in stacks of paper and boxes of documents. Most of the documents were not important, but needed to be kept in case they were ever needed.
This brought up the next problem: it was nearly impossible to find things we needed. Tax return from 2001? “ummm, yeah. that’s in a box somewhere.” This was followed by a Saturday afternoon lost to hunting through dusty boxes. We also move around fairly often, and I cringe to think about how much it has cost us to continually move the same boxes over and over without ever opening them.
The main problems I needed to solve were:
* Reclaim storage space
* Reclaim open space like desktops and drawers
* Make it easier and faster to find important documents
The solution I implemented was to purchase a scanner and start converting all the documents to pdf. As I am a bit cheap, I opted to get the midrange Canon Lide 60, as the reviews showed that it had ok speed and more than enough quality for printed documents. I originally started with a Canon Lide 30, but quickly stopped using it, as it was taking over a minute to scan one sheet of paper. The Lide 60 is about twice as fast, so 20-30 seconds per scan is good enough for me.
Now that the documents were in the computer, I had a list of directories organized by date, and very unhelpful filenames like “image223.pdf.” Now I needed a way to sort the documents in such a way that they could easily be searched or browsed.
What I chose to to was to use Apple’s Smart Folders based on Spotlight keywords. I created a Smart Folder for each tag that I would use to organize the documents like this:
Another advantage to doing it this way is that the scanner is able to recognize about 80% of the text on the documents that I was scanning, so spotlight would be able to search them. For example, if I search for my SSN with Spotlight, I get a lot of tax documents from previous years. How cool is that!
My workflow is pretty much like this:
- Scan a bunch of documents into PDF so that I would have a directory of new PDF files
- Tag each PDF with some meaningful tags
- When I was done tagging I would move the date-based directory to a ‘tagged’ directory
- When I want to find something, I would open the smart folder and use a handy utility called Informator that takes the selected item in the Finder and renders a preview of it
If that was not sufficient to find what I was looking for, I could do a more complex Spotlight search like this one:
My scheme is still not perfect, and I am constantly tinkering with it. If you have any suggestions on how to improve upon this, please leave a comment here, or drop me an email. As of now I am down to very few boxes of papers by slowly chipping away at it, and no new paper coming into the house gets saved unless it is important to have the original copy.
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