Tips To Learn How To Go Paperless | DocumentSnap Paperless Blog

In Tim Cook’s Apple Event in October, he gave the usual roundup of Apple achievements. One interesting quote was this one:

In the cockpit, pilots are using it. They are replacing 40 pound flight bags full of paper manuals and logbooks and navigational charts and checklists, making the pilot more efficient and making the plane more fuel efficient.

That quote reminded me of a fascinating New York Times article from the summer that I had clipped to Evernote, that went into much more detail about this.

The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized a handful of commercial and charter carriers to use the tablet computer as a so-called electronic flight bag. Private pilots, too, are now carrying iPads, which support hundreds of general aviation apps that simplify preflight planning and assist with in-flight operations.

“The iPad allows pilots to quickly and nimbly access information,” said Jim Freeman, a pilot and director of flight standards at Alaska Airlines, which has given iPads to all its pilots. “When you need to a make a decision in the cockpit, three to four minutes fumbling with paper is an eternity.”

Call me a clueless air traveller, but I had no idea that pilots had to haul 40 pounds of paper onto each flight. This is the sort of area where tablets can be a hugely disruptive device.

Speaking of disruption, check out these cost savings:

“I didn’t ease into using the iPad,” said Mr. Long, who has been a pilot for more than 30 years. “I jumped.”
His motivation was to save on subscriptions to paper maps and charts, which had cost him $1,414 a year. He now gets the same maps and charts digitally delivered to his two iPads for $150 a year. His iPads are also loaded with digital versions of all his aircraft, equipment and operating manuals as well as a complete copy of F.A.A. rules and regulations.

That is remarkable.

After the event, TechCrunch tried to test the fuel efficiency claim. Apparently his math was a little off, but read the comments on the post from actual pilots.

Any pilots in the crowd here? Do you use an iPad in-flight? How about my fellow passengers. Any concerns about pilots switching from paper to the iPad? I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

PS: RIP, Steve.

(Photo by Global X)

From time to time, I like to feature interesting scanning projects here on DocumentSnap, and it is pretty difficult to find one more interesting than this.

I’m going to guess that you have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but if not, here is what Wikipedia has to say:

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name. They were specifically located at Khirbet Qumran in the British Mandate for Palestine, in what is now named the West Bank.

In most cases, the only way to see the Scrolls has been to go to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. However, now the museum, in conjunction with Google, has unveiled the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Project.

Here is what Google has to say about it in their blog post:

Now, anyone around the world can view, read and interact with five digitized Dead Sea Scrolls. The high resolution photographs, taken by Ardon Bar-Hama, are up to 1,200 megapixels, almost 200 times more than the average consumer camera, so viewers can see even the most minute details in the parchment. For example, zoom in on the Temple Scroll to get a feel for the animal skin it’s written on—only one-tenth of a millimeter thick.

You can browse the Great Isaiah Scroll, the most well known scroll and the one that can be found in most home bibles, by chapter and verse. You can also click directly on the Hebrew text and get an English translation. While you’re there, leave a comment for others to see.

This is a really cool project with a cool video. Check it out:

I’d still love to go see the real thing someday, but for now, this will have to do.

(via Laughing Squid)

Ever since my kids reached school age, I’ve been fascinated with how teachers do their jobs. It is definitely not an easy profession.

It is also clear that schools usually generate a lot of paper when you are a parent.

To that end, I was really interested to find Vicki Davis’ Cool Cat Teacher blog.

Aside from a bunch of great content about teaching, she has started a great series called Tales From A Paperless As Possible Classroom.

There was also an update a few days later called Paperless As Possible: 3 trees in a year in which she goes into a bit more detail.

It is about streamlining the workflow. Keeping it simple (for the kids and me.) I just don’t see the point in printing out things that are going in the trash after I look at them unless they really NEED to be on paper. I can grade on my ipad and don’t have to lug home a big old bag any more.

There’s some great tips on her blog, so if you are a teacher it might be worth checking out, and if you are a parent maybe you can nicely nudge your teacher in that direction too.

Does your classroom (or your kids’ classroom) have any good tips for going paperless? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

(Photo by Sister72)

Those of you who follow me on Facebook or on Twitter will know that my old 2007 MacBook Pro just died. I’ll take it to the Apple Store for them to check out, but I suspect it has gone to logic board heaven.

This is the first time I have ever had a computer I am actively working on die (I’ve never even had a drive failure), so here are some things I’ve learned from the process so far.

Don’t Tempt Fate

I have often joked “I hope my old computer dies so I will have an excuse to buy one of the shiny new ones.”

I also told someone a few days ago that I have been holding off upgrading to Lion because I wanted to do a fresh install, and haven’t found the time to do it.

Guess what? Now that I am getting both my wishes, it’s not so fun. Next time, I’ll keep my mouth shut.

Backups Make Things Annoying But Not Stressful

You know that expression “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”? Thankfully, one area where I do not fall into that category is with backups.

I do pretty much everything in this How To Backup Your Computer video. My SuperDuper! clone backup had run the day before, and my Time Machine backup had run an hour before.

I also have an online backup with CrashPlan and just to make things even more paranoid, I have my critical files backed up at a friend’s house.

I also tend to store whatever I am working on in Dropbox, so many files are backed up realtime to Dropbox’s servers.

All this is to say, while this whole process is annoying, at no point have I felt stressed out about losing anything important. It’s a nice feeling.

Love The Cloud

I am typing this on my wife’s old second-hand white MacBook, and since my failure, I have done pieces of things on my iPad, on this computer, on my Windows 7 laptop, and on my parents’ 27″ iMac.

All this is made super-easy with cloud services like Dropbox and Evernote. I can’t imagine what a pain things would be if I wasn’t able to seamlessly switch between computers and devices.

Also having my 1Password and TextExpander data synced has been incredibly helpful. My 1Password app on my iPhone has certainly been getting a workout. Not having TextExpander on my wife’s computer is like eating glass though – I am going to have to rectify this.

Mac App Store

The Mac App Store has been great for quickly installing applications. You don’t really appreciate it until you have to install a number of them all at once.

Life Didn’t Stop Because My Computer Died

Unfortunately, the real world kept going even though my computer didn’t. I had a hard deadline at 5pm yesterday for a new project I am working on for DocumentSnap, and the failure did slow me down a bit. I got it done though – at 4:52pm. Having things backed up and accessible is important if you are in a situation where downtime is a problem for you.

Fortunately for me, this all happened on a long weekend, so the only real impact will likely be no video post this week.

Look At It As An Opportunity

As the Monty Python song goes, I try to always look at the bright side of life. I had been meaning to do a clean install of Lion anyways, so this way I can go through and see what things I really need from my old computer and what had been junking up my computer over the last four years.

Also, my old MacBook Pro was getting pretty slow at doing video, so I’m looking forward to a new, faster computer.

Have you ever had a computer failure? How did the recovery go? Any more lessons learned? Let us know in the comments.

(Photo by andymangold)

In the past week, I’ve had two instances where going paperless has come in very handy.

Neither of these are earth shattering in and of themselves, but they are examples of little things over time that can add up to make life easier when you can find what you need, when you need it.

“Did You Send In Your Registration?”

This year, we are putting my youngest son in a new preschool. His cousin previously went there, and his other cousin will be going with him this year. Also, my oldest son did a daycamp there, so we know the place somewhat well.

A week ago, my sister-in-law asked us if we’d be attending the open house on the weekend to meet the teachers, ease the kids in, etc. Our response was “what open house?”

I didn’t think too much about not receiving notification at the time, because we live in a townhouse complex and it is not unheard of for physical mail to be delivered to the wrong house. So on the weekend, we went to the school.

When we got there, one of the owners took me aside. “Umm, did you send in your registration forms? Did you send in post-dated checks or a pre-authorized payment form?”

It’s safe to say that “did you send in your registration forms?” is not a sentence you want to hear a week before school is supposed to start.

I started second-guessing myself. It was way back in February. Did we send it in? Did we give it to my sister-in-law or something? How did we pay?

I whipped out my iPhone and fired up the Dropbox app and typed in the name of the school in the search box. Sure enough, up came the signed registration forms that I had scanned in. The PDF was too large for the Dropbox app to handle properly, but I was able to open it in GoodReader.

I showed it to the school, and then they remembered receiving it. “Ohh right, you sent us an electronic copy. I thought it was so cool how you had filled out the PDF without having to write on it.” Thank you PDFPen for that.

I used the Dropbox app to create a link and re-send it to them there, and the problem was solved.

By the way, as far as I know, the Dropbox app only searches by filename, not file contents. This demonstrates the importance of naming your files well.

Saving Money With Evernote

Once a year, Vancouver has a big fair called the PNE, and yesterday evening we decided to head down there as a family. I was at home, my wife was at work, and the kids were at their grandparents’.

Like most of these types of events, tickets to get in are expensive, and being cheap I wanted to save money.

I was running late to pick up the kids, and just as I was heading out the door, I had this vague recollection that my son’s elementary school had some sort of discount.

I fired up Evernote, did a global search using the ^⌘E keyboard shortcut, and typed “PNE”. The first result that popped up was the last school newsletter of last year that I had scanned to Evernote, and sure enough, near the bottom was a discount code for the PNE. I punched it in, and saved $10. Yeah!

In this case, having the document searchable via OCR made finding information that I never would have put in the filename possible.

How About You?

So, those are two simple of examples that have happened to me over the last week of how useful it can be to have your documents scanned, named properly, and searchable. Do you have any similar stories? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

(Photo by www.metaphoricalplatypus.com)

“Do you need a paper receipt, or is e-mail fine?”

Every time I go to the Apple Store to buy something (an event my wife would say is much too common), I am given the option to have my receipt e-mailed to me. In almost every case, I choose the e-mail option.

Given the fact that I run this website, I am probably a bit of an edge case. I started wondering what kind of adoption paperless receipts are having.

The Boston Herald had an article on the topic:

“It’s the next big thing in retail,” said Richard Mader, executive director of the Association for Retail Technology Standards, a division of the National Retail Federation. “In five years, up to 60 percent of retailers will go paperless.” Colin Johnson, a Nordstrom spokesman, said all of its stores started offering the paperless option this month.

Of course, retailers aren’t doing it just to make things convenient for us. According to this New York Times article, some retailers (I’m looking at you, Gap) are using those e-mail addresses for marketing purposes. The Times had an interesting quote from Patagonia:

That marketing potential is a drawback to some customers, said Robert Cohen, vice president of retail at Patagonia, which began offering e-receipts nine months ago. “People are very protective of their e-mail in-box,” he said, so only about one-third of Patagonia’s customers choose an electronic receipt.

To be honest, I am surprised it is as high as one-third.

How about you? Do you take the paperless receipt option, or do you like the perceived safety of walking out of the store with a piece of paper? I’m curious what others do.

(Photo by ben_onthemove)

I’ve been meaning to point to this ever since I saw it on Hacker News, but I was finally motivated by DocumentSnap reader drew in this Batch OCR forum post.

Software developer Steve Losh wanted to go paper-free but couldn’t bring himself to drop $400 for a ScanSnap (fair enough), so he decided to put together his own workflow. He outlined it in this fantastic post: Going Paper-Free For $220.

Most of the tools he uses are familiar to long-time DocumentSnap readers such as a Doxie, JotNot, and of course my favorite, Hazel.

I wasn’t familiar with the OCR package that he uses, so I will have to dig into that one more.

All-in-all, great workflow and worth checking out if you are a Mac user. Even if you use a different scanner, you might pick up something useful.

Do you have any money saving tricks that you’ve used in your workflow? Let us know in the comments.

(Photo by Tony Crider)

This post is going to be a bit different than my usual fare, which often focuses on the more technical aspects of going paperless.

I’ve been writing DocumentSnap since the summer of 2008, and have had the opportunity to communicate with a large and fantastic group of readers.

Many have gone paperless and want to optimize their workflow, but many have been struggling to get started. They know (sort of) what they want to do, but find the whole thing too overwhelming.

This has been bothering me for quite some time, but I couldn’t put my finger on why or what to do about it.

Everything crystallized at the beginning of June when I attended Chris Guillebeau’s World Domination Summit

At Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits meetup and at Pam Slim’s content map session, I realized that I needed to outline my thoughts in a post and figure out what it is that is holding people back.

(Look at me look at Leo!)

From my experience, the roadblock manifests itself in two ways:

1. Focusing on details that don’t really matter (yet)
2. Fear

In this post I aim to tackle both subjects and to convince you that at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is to start.

Don’t Sweat The Details

One of the great things about the Internet (and, more specifically sites like DocumentSnap) is that there is so much information out there. On almost any topic, you can find a metric ton of articles telling you how to do exactly what it is that you want to do.

On the surface this sounds great: the more information the better right?

It would be fantastic, if it were not for the type of issue that we are trying to solve by going paperless. More often than not, we are starting down this path because we already have a problem: our workspace is a disaster and we can’t find anything, we have 300 boxes of paper in our way, we need to downsize, the list goes on.

If we are already overwhelmed by the problem we are trying to solve, layering onto that an overwhelming number of solutions leads to shutting down.

Instead of looking at the big picture, we start to focus on the details. What should our folders be called? What is the perfect folder structure? Which is better, this software or that software? What on earth are tags? Ahhhh!

I am sure you can guess what comes next. By going crazy focusing on the details of our problem, we don’t actually do anything.

No Need To Apologize

The number one area that this paralysis occurs is around folder structure.

It is understandable why this is. Coming from a paper-based system, how you file things is absolutely critical. If you don’t know where you filed it, you’ll never find it again (unless you are like Eddie from Practically Efficient)

Before I continue, I want to stress that I am not at all against having a defined folder structure. Having a folder structure that means something to you can be very helpful.

I have received many emails that start with “I know I shouldn’t use folders but it is just the way my mind works…”. I couldn’t figure out where I picked up this reputation for being anti-folders, until I realized that a section title in my 4 Ways To Tame Your Documents ebook was “Forget Folders”. Oops.

The point I was trying to make in that section, bad title aside, is that with modern software we don’t need to go nuts creating a huge folder structure. This causes two problems: 1) It causes us to spend more time figuring out where to file a document, and 2) It causes the sort of detail-paralysis I referred to above. We spend so much time trying to come up with the perfect folder structure, we never actually start scanning.

Having said all that, if you like your folders, no need to apologize. Use whatever works for you.

Fear

Based on the emails that I receive, fear is a big issue with DocumentSnap readers.

If you are reading this and you can relate to a fear of getting started going paperless, I will first tell you that you are not alone.

Part of the reason that I started the Paperless Reader Stories feature is to share some of your fellow readers’ stories. They have overcome their fears and obstacles (or are in the process of doing so).

While everyone’s situation is different, there are two basic fears that people have when going paperless.

Fear Of Not Being Able To Find Things

The first fear that people have is that once they scan something, they won’t be able to find it again. If you’ve ever tried to hunt through your computer for a file that you know you saved, you’ll understand this fear.

Some basic strategies for getting around this fear are:

• Keep your document archive separate from the rest of your files. If you save it in Documents on the Mac or My Documents on Windows, create a folder underneath called ARCHIVE or File Cabinet or something and put your scanned documents in there.
• Make sure that your PDFs are searchable by turning on the OCR settings in your scanners’ software, or using a software package with OCR capabilities.
• Use a consistent naming convention for your files and stick to it.
• Use a folder structure that makes sense to you.

Fear Of Throwing Paper Away

This one is a biggie. It takes a lot of confidence to shred a document that until now you have religiously kept in your bulging file cabinet.

The simple solution to this fear is to trust your system, whatever it happens to be. As long as your documents are backed up in multiple locations and you have the ability to find them again, you should be good.

However, even that might not be enough for you. I especially see this with married couples where one spouse wants to go paperless and the other is afraid.

Sometimes no matter how bulletproof the system is, the fear of shredding documents is just too great.

If that sounds like you, what I recommend is that you still go through the scanning and indexing process as if you were going paperless, but then instead of shredding the paper, throw it in a box out of the way somewhere. This is where Eddie’s system might come in very handy.

This way, you have the benefits of a paperless workflow like searchability, backup, and lack of clutter, but you have the peace of mind of having the physical paper somewhere.

Starting

You’ve seen that focusing on the details and succumbing to our fears causes paralysis. This is not in any way unique to going paperless.

Lyle McDonald has a great article over at Body Recomposition on this topic as it pertains to fat loss:

Of more relevance, what often happens is that people get so overwhelmed at focusing on the details that they never act. They spend weeks looking for the perfect diet or training program (which doesn’t really exist in the first place, at best all programs have pros and cons and are, at most, best under a given set of circumstances) and lose time when they should simply be doing something.
Because, at the end of the day, assuming the training or diet isn’t completely and utterly moronic (and make no mistake, there are plenty of those out there) actually doing something is always better than talking about it for weeks on end.

Does this sound familiar? (I’m talking about going paperless now, not dieting!).

If it does, not to worry. There are some things you can do to just get started.

Ignore Complexity

A lot of information that you read online is complex. I am more guilty than anyone on this point.

I would post crazy Applescripts and Hazel workflows all day long if I could, because I am a geek and sadly, that is the sort of thing that I find fun. I also have a great group of enablers such as Michelle and Alex that read the site, so it just encourages me.

Of course, normal non-geeks read this stuff and become overwhelmed. All they want to do is make their life easier, and this crazy Canadian is talking about Source URLs and text expansion?

Here is a sample comment that I received recently. I’m not picking on Marti here, because he is saying what I suspect a lot of people think:

All of this is so confusing to me. I have been ready, willing and able to go paperless, but like bungee jumping for the first time, I can’t bring myself to do it out of fear. I read the 7 lessons, but there is so much talk of other apps: Hazel, Evernote, Snippet and others I can’t even remember. Where do I start and how do I learn to be at the level of all the users here?

Again, does this sound familiar?

The solution to this is to just ignore the complex stuff. That’s right, just ignore it. None of it is required to successfully go paperless. You can come back to it if you ever need it, but for now, just ignore it.

Just Start

To get started, this is all you need to do:

1. Get a decent scanner. I like the ScanSnap, but it is certainly not the only one on the market.
2. Create a very basic, very high level folder structure. When you find that it makes sense to you, create subfolders on an as-needed basis.
3. Set up your scanner to scan to an inbox folder. In the scanner settings, make sure that it is set to create a searchable PDF.
4. Once you scan, name the files appropriately and move them to the appropriate folders.

That’s it. Start with this for a week or two.

Iterate

Once you have been doing the basic scanning workflow for a while, if you find that there are things that you wish were a bit easier start writing them down.

• Do you wish there were ways to make renaming files faster?
• Do you see points that you wish you could automate?
• Do you think it’d be easier to just have everything in one software package vs. your native folders?
• Would you like to have access to your documents on the go?
• Could you make things faster to find?

On an as-needed basis, start looking into solutions to the points of improvement that you come up with. (Quick plug: the Paperless Document Organization Guide may help with this).

The point is to make the changes that you want to make when you want to make them, bit by bit. Maybe you’re happy with how things are now after your test, and that is awesome. Keep doing what you are doing.

The important thing is to start.

Does this resonate with you? What barriers do you have, or have you overcome? I’d love to hear your thoughts either in the comments or the forum.

(Photo by Armosa Studios)

I am of the opinion that you can sometimes learn as much from someone’s mistakes than you can from their successes. With that in mind, I present to you a mistake (mine of course), and some successes (DocumentSnap’s smart readers, naturally).

The subject? Tracking your to-be-paid bills when you are going paperless.

The Mistake

You might remember that I have put together this great workflow for processing downloaded PDFs using Hazel and a bit of TextExpander. I’ve even enhanced it by having Hazel apply OpenMeta tags.

This has been working great, and I’ve been really happy with the results. For companies with whom I have requested paperless billing, I go to the site, download the PDF, use a quick TextExpander snippet to give it a name, and then Hazel magically whisks it away to my filing system.

It was all working really well until one day I received a letter from my local electricity utility. It turns out that when a company sends you a bill, they would prefer that you pay it. Oops. Somehow in my paperless workflow frenzy, I had filed away my electric bill without paying it.

This led me to wonder: what do DocumentSnap’s readers do to track their payable bills? Since this was before the Forum, I turned to social media.

The Smart People

I asked on Twitter and on the Facebook page the following question:

Question: With paperless bills, how do you remind yourself that a bill is due? ToPay folder? Alarm somewhere?

Here are some of the responses:

Brandon: I scan bills to Evernote with the tag: /Unpaid Bills. Stays at top of tag list. Then I delete the tag when bill is paid.

cryptochrome: I use box.net and set alarm/task for each bill with automatic Google Cal sync.

Ian: I have everything set to preauthorized. Everything except rent and BC Hydro go on a credit card (with cashback rewards) and those two are direct from my primary bank account. And then the credit card is set to auto pay in full monthly, so I never have to worry about forgetting to pay a bill.

Lee: Monthly payables are setup on Excel spreadsheet with headings NAME; ACCT NO; ID/PW; Internet Address; BALANCE; PAYMENT; STATUS (PD/DUE); DATE; B/L (Becky/Lee). It seems so simple this way. When I eventually do like Ian and set them all to automatic payment. As long as I keep enough money in the bank, the monthly payments flow seamlessly and effortlessly. I even set up one line item using a separate bank account at another bank (Ally). It’s like the old Xmas Club account. I put enough money in the account monthly to accumulate the total I need in January to pay the annual payments for property taxes; LTC Health Insurance; Life Insurance; Dental Insurance, etc. Those items I pay annually. It works so well, I think I’ll patent it. (not likely) but it does seem I really have a handle on monthly bills this way. Of course, this is all ‘paperless’

Alex Satrapa also did a good post in the Forum about how he tracks payables with tags.

When you subscribe to paperless billing, how do you track what needs to be paid? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Document preparation is something I have written about before, but probably not often enough.

What do I mean by document preparation? Taking a bit of time before you start scanning to organize your documents so that the scanning process goes much more smoothly.

Over on the AIIM Capture Expert Blog, Chris Riley (aka the “Imaging Savant”) has an excellent post titled Scanner rage!, and gives 5 tips how to avoid it.

Yes document preparation, in an age of technology, is the last thing we want to put effort into before scanning. After all why can’t the scanner remove staples for us! Document preparation is one of those things that if you don’t do it well, you will cause much more frustration and pain later. Worst case you scan poor quality images, and destroy your original document, in the best case you spot the issue but waste time with a re-scan. Even on scanners with an ADF as small as 30-sheets, if you run a paperless office like I do, you need to think about doc prep

Check out his post for the tips. I especially like the first one. I don’t know why I had never thought of ripping the pages off at the corner instead of messing around with a staple remover. Obviously there are some cases where you may not want to do this, but if you are going to be shredding the thing anyways, why not?

Do you have any other “pre-scan” document prep tips that you use? Let us know in the comments.

(Photo by Keees)