A key component of my paperless workflow is a Mac application called Hazel.
I love it so much that I even created a webinar about how I use Hazel to go paperless.
The software is great for automatically naming and moving my electronic documents, but there has always been one shortcoming: what about the date?
I always recommend that you put the date in your filename, but this has been a barrier to automation. You could cheat and just use the scan or download date instead of the "real" date, or you could do some crazy workarounds, but neither are ideal.
Yesterday Noodlesoft released Version 3.1 and it has an absolute killer feature for us paperless types: via some sort of black magic, it can extract the date from the contents of a searchable PDF, and then you can use that date to name your files.
This is the holy grail and lets us completely automate our paperless process.
David Sparks over at MacSparky has created a fantastic screencast showing how this new feature works. I highly recommend checking it out, and I can’t wait to start refactoring my Hazel rules.
