Over the last couple of years, I have been on a mission to expunge every piece of paper from my office, at least as much as possible.
I have scanned and subsequently shredded literally tens of thousands of pages of documents of every description that had accumulated in a wall full of lateral file cabinets.
Now that I've got all those documents scanned to PDF and organized into a series of folders, its pretty easy to keep up as new documents arrive.
About once per week, I process the documents that have accumulated, and run them through the scanner.
I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 which scans double-sided black and white at about 20 pages per minute.
I scan into a folder structure which is synced via DropBox, so I can access my documents from any of my computers, smartphone or anywhere I can get to the Internet with a web browser.
Everybody has to decide for themselves how much they trust these cloud-based services, and what is the appropriate retention period for tax and legal documents, but this system has revolutionized my filing and document processing ability.
Even if you choose to continue to physically file the original copies of your documents, the ability to instantly search and retrieve a document from anywhere is something I find tremendously valuable.
I have scanned and subsequently shredded literally tens of thousands of pages of documents of every description that had accumulated in a wall full of lateral file cabinets.
Now that I've got all those documents scanned to PDF and organized into a series of folders, its pretty easy to keep up as new documents arrive.
About once per week, I process the documents that have accumulated, and run them through the scanner.
I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 which scans double-sided black and white at about 20 pages per minute.
I scan into a folder structure which is synced via DropBox, so I can access my documents from any of my computers, smartphone or anywhere I can get to the Internet with a web browser.
Everybody has to decide for themselves how much they trust these cloud-based services, and what is the appropriate retention period for tax and legal documents, but this system has revolutionized my filing and document processing ability.
Even if you choose to continue to physically file the original copies of your documents, the ability to instantly search and retrieve a document from anywhere is something I find tremendously valuable.