Start At The End

Start At The End

Finish LineBy way of David Sparks on Twitter, I came across this excellent post by Chris Holscher: Going Paperless: Learn & Start from the End.

It ties in nicely with Daniel Gold’s Slideshare about focusing on the process that I posted about last week.

When I do talks about going paperless, I always start out by asking the audience to imagine what it is they are trying to get out of implementing a paperless system. What problem are they trying to solve? How will their end workflow look? How do they like to work with their computer?[1]

For better or for worse, we all do things differently and our brains are all wired in different ways. By thinking about the end state first, we can work backwards and figure out how to accomplish it. As Chris says:

Thinking about these phase 3 (use) aspects, it becomes obvious that the answers have a big impact on how phase 2 (process) would ideally have to look like. Simple example: If you like the comfort of a dedicated piece of software for handling your documents, then it’s worth considering to do the OCR processing of your documents through the Evernote service. The other way round – if you prefer working with raw file structures, then your OCR processing has to happen somewhere else. Phase 3 impact on phase 2.

I’ll be honest – none of this comes naturally to me. I prefer to go in and start messing around with Hazel rules and ScanSnap Manager Profiles. However, putting some thought in up-front about how and why you are going to do this stuff can make a big difference to your paperless success.

I highly recommend that you give Chris’ post a read, and check out the other posts on his blog about his paperless journey.

(Photo by jayneandd)


  1. In all honesty, I start every talk with “I just flew in from Vancouver and boy are my arms tired”. Kills every time.  ↩

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

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