Tidy '24: Analog Week 2 - Papers

It's time to dive into the second week of Analog Month, where we're taking a break from digital data organization and looking at physical counterparts: paper, printed photos, and other physical media.

Last week, I encouraged you to consider what kind of "physical data" you have hanging around but not worry about doing anything with it yet. Today, it's time to look at the first (and possibly most formidable) category of such data: papers.

Analog Week 2: Papers

In this world of ubiquitous technology, paper is still surprisingly polarizing.

Some people go to great lengths to avoid acquiring or keeping printed copies of just about anything. (That describes me, in case you were wondering.) Paper feels inefficient, wasteful, and needlessly difficult to manage. Why take up space for something that could be stored and viewed digitally, with all its benefits and conveniences? I can't run an instant global search through a pile of documents sitting on a table, can I?

On the other hand, some people find themselves on the opposite end of the spectrum and do their best to avoid digital copies. Rather than adding value, digital data feels less accessible, more complicated to keep track of, or less secure than something you can hold in your hands. Some of these people already have established filing systems. Perhaps they stick with habits that have been working--well enough, anyway--for decades.

This month (and specifically this week), I'm not trying to convince you that printed paper is evil and you should "go digital" wherever possible. If you're already doing something that works for you, keep doing it. But if you don't have a good system for organizing papers and regularly feel overwhelmed by the mess, read on!

Paper Problems

As with other Tidy Bytes topics, start by hunting down the core problem. What about your "printed material situation" is making your life harder than you want, and what would you like to see instead? Here are some example questions to prime your thinking:

• Do you receive a lot more paper than you want? If so, why is that?
• Do you keep important documents but don't know what to do with them? If so, are you sure they're important?
• Do you know how to identify important papers and what you should do with them, but you don't have time?

Although the paper we have to deal with doesn't always come in through the mail, our digitally oriented solutions for cleaning up email apply quite well with just a few tweaks. I encourage you to look at that linked article for reference. Beyond that, here are some ideas about how to begin working through a mess of paper:

1. The easiest paper to organize is the paper you never receive. Just like unsubscribing from multiple email sources, your best "first step" is to avoid collecting paper in the first place. If you don't absolutely need a printed copy, don't get one.
2. Immediately throw out everything that doesn't require follow-up. When I get my mail, the very first placeI go after walking back in the door is to the recycling can. Ads for stores and restaurants we don't frequent, coupons we won't use, political marketing for candidates we don't care about--all of it goes straight into the bin. Mail never piles up.
3. Designate a prominent place for everything that does require follow-up. The corollary to the above rule is that anything you need to deal with must not get lost. Things like utility bills and personal correspondence belong here. You can have an actual inbox for this purpose or a dedicated place on your table, counter, desk, or whatever makes sense. Make it impossible to miss, and don't mix unimportant items into the same space.
4. Keeping paper "just in case" is nearly always a waste of space. (Hey, that rhymed!) In other words, only let yourself keep things if you know why they are important enough to keep. An example of such a category of documents I've dealt with is my electric bill. I previously kept those for a long time because I wanted a record of electricity usage over time--10 or more years--as a point of curiosity as my family grew. But then it occurred to me that I could just add one new row per month to a simple spreadsheet and then toss the paper out, thereby recouping multiple inches of file drawer space in a single move!
5. The key to managing paper clutter is consistency. You don't have to organize (or throw out) everything at once. Like with a massive email organization project, start by tweaking your habits to bring in less. Then, slowly work through what you've collected, one page or one small stack at a time. Every victory brings you closer to a clean desktop, countertop, floor, or dining room table.

To Digitize or Not To Digitize?

With one foot firmly in the digital world--as we always are with Tidy Bytes--the natural follow-up question is whether digitizing some or all of the printed material cluttering up your home makes sense.

• 👍 The good news is that it's very easy to do--far more accessible than it used to be, especially if you have a reasonably modern smartphone. You don't even need a document scanner, although having one can make your life much easier in some cases.
• 🤬 The bad news is that you may find yourself transforming a physical problem into a digital one by accident, converting physical things that you shouldn't keep into digital things that you still shouldn't keep. Don't be this person. (Note: I have been this person.)

Consider the following questions to help determine whether to go to the effort of making a digital copy of a physical document:

1. Do you need to keep this document in any form? If not, throw it out. DO NOT waste time and effort digitizing something you don't need.
2. Do you need to keep this document in physical form? If so, put it in a secure filing location. For example, you should keep physical copies of birth certificates and property titles (although having a secure digital copy as a backup is wise).
3. Do you need to keep everything in the document? If you only need a small portion of the information, like the date and power consumption details from an electric bill, consider a more compact and simple way to keep that information.

Feel free to go ahead if you can pass all of these questions. But how, exactly, do you "go ahead" with digitizing?

Digitizing Methods

There are really two parts to second, what to do with it once it's in digital form. It's easy to stop after the first step, but doing so leaves you with a pile of images or documents with little to no organization. It doesn't take up physical space, but otherwise, it's not much better than what you started with.

To answer the first question, you have four main options for converting paper to digital files:

1. Use a smartphone app (easy, cheap, accessible)
2. Use a multifunction printer/scanner (less easy, not cheap)
3. Use a dedicated document scanner (less easy, not cheap)
4. Pay someone else to do it (easy with a caveat, definitely not cheap)

There are advantages to each of these options.

The smartphone app is the easiest to start with since it requires nothing beyond what most people already have. However, you have to capture every side of every page by hand. You'll also want to find a spot with reliable lighting and an angle to avoid glare, or get a fancy camera/phone holder designed for this exact task. This method works well enough to manage a regular but small influx of new documents, like bills or receipts that arrive every few days. But if you have stacks or boxes of hundreds or thousands of papers, it quickly becomes tedious. (However, in that case, you should also strongly reconsider whether you need to keep all that material in the first place.)

For larger tasks, or if you have the budget and space for it, a dedicated scanning device significantly streamlines the digitization process. Whether you use a multifunction machine (like a printer/copier/scanner) or something explicitly built for document scanning, the important thing is to make sure it has an automatic document feeder (a.k.a. "ADF") and scans both sides of each page (a.k.a. "duplex scanning"). With such a device, you can load a stack of papers into the document feeder and click a single button to obtain high-quality digital versions.

And, of course, there's always the option of paying someone else. Most document scanning services focus on business customers, but some (like the one I linked above) are also open for personal jobs. The caveat to this approach is that you don't have the opportunity to review and organize during the digitization process. You can't decide mid-stream that you don't need a specific document (or an entire stack or box). This isn't a deal-breaker, but it's something to consider.

Post-Digitizing Organization

To address what to do with your freshly digitized material, think about why you decided to go to the effort in the first place. You already figured out that it's worth keeping, and that means you should know why it might be useful or valuable in the future. (If you don't, re-evaluate your choice ASAP.)

All the digitization methods described above provide at least basic options for organizing the new digital files. Decent apps or scanning devices typically generate PDF files and perform optical character recognition (OCR), extracting searchable text from each page. You can also tag documents as you scan them and provide names beyond the generic date/time of the moment you scanned them. Most also allow automatic integration with popular cloud storage services, like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud.

If you provide enough detail during the scanning process (such as a reasonable document name, date, and category tag), and your app or device synchronizes directly into your favorite cloud storage service, that might be all you need to do. All of your digital documents end up in a searchable location, and you can find them by name and date.

On the other hand, your chosen method might not give you much flexibility during the process. For example, using a multifunction printer/scanner generally only gives you a timestamped PDF file for output, and using a scan-by-the-box paid service similarly leaves you with a monolithic collection of timestamped or index-numbered files to download. In that case, you must finish the process by reviewing each file and then filing, renaming, or tagging it as needed.

For a real-world example, I'll explain my process. I have the luxury of only needing to manage a trickle of new printed material; I don't have a backlog of paper to work through. But if I did, this same process could work just as well. For reference, I have a trusty (now discontinued) Brother MFC-L3770CDW multifunction printer with ADF and duplex scanning. I also have the SwiftScan iOS app, though I use it less often because of the kind of material I usually need to scan and where I am when I need to scan it.

1. Load related paper(s) into the ADF in my printer/scanner
2. Use the "2-sided PDF scan" shortcut on the printer controls to initiate the scanning process
3. Wait for the scan to complete and the output file to sync to Dropbox
4. Use my desktop PC to rename the new file (e.g. "20241108212621_001.pdf") to something more informative (e.g. "20241108_hospital_bill.pdf")
5. Move the file into my "Documents/Records/Medical" folder, part of what's automatically backed up from my computer

The whole process takes about two minutes, and the only parts I have to think about are the naming and moving steps at the end.

I keep very few printed copies of anything—the ones I hold onto fit into a few inches of document space inside a fire safe. Everything else gets recycled immediately or (in rare cases) digitized and then recycled. It took me a while to reach this point, but it was worth it.

What do you think? Does this feel both achievable and worth the effort? Can you envision a life without a mess of papers everywhere? Or do you see things differently and find either no value in this process or no hope that you could pull it off? Let me know! I love hearing from you, especially if you have questions.

Enjoy this week, and happy (analog) data-taming!