Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I was able to rid myself of 4 boxes of paper and still keep them. I decided I wanted to move my filing cabinet to PDF. If you ever get in the mood to do this, these things might help you figure out the process.

Here are a couple things to consider.

1. Is it worth it. (Deciding)
2. Digitizing the files. (Hardware)
3. Storing and finding the files. (Software)
4. Sharing the files. (Output)
5. Thinking 5 years down the line. (Longevity of your solution)

So, 1. Is it worth it. This is a personal question ultimately. I found that I was moving around year upon year of paper records of things gone by – taxes, house closing documents, phone bills, cable bills, credit card bills, articles I thought  were interesting, old college forms and grades, articles I’d written, HOA forms and newsletters, and above all – manuals. Boxes and boxes of manuals. We moved about a year ago and having hauled all these things around, I was REALLY in the mood to get rid of them. But more than just the annoyance of carrying boxes of paper around, we had an additional problem. In our new house as in our old, we really didn’t have a place to put a filing cabinet, and I’ve always considered filing cabinets the Black Hole of Paper – paper goes in and is never seen again. I wanted something a bit more accessible. I remember clearly the last time I was filing for a home refinance the amount of paper I had to track down.

So I did two things before deciding to go digital. One was to look for a filing cabinet I could stand to see and use. This meant to me that it had to contain all the boxes of paper I had now plus a growth rate of about one box a year minus any throwing away I could do, plus not look like something that fell off the school district’s truck. I wanted furniture. Not glass fronted or something stupid, but just not looking like a steel box with handles. This put me in the $200 range or higher. So then I thought, “Fine, so where do I put it?” That was the breaking point. I looked at the home we are in now and realized quite clearly that if I was to put it anywhere, it would end up in the garage. And that killed the entire thought. Keep in mind I live in San Jose, we don’t have basements or attics, and rarely have garages. That’s another observation I’ll explore another time.

In fact, because this is becoming quite long, I’m going to break this into many posts. Next I’ll explore why I bought the scanner I did.