Why didn’t anyone tell me…

If you’re like me you read a lot of, “wow, that’d be neat” type of articles. Like on creating that Digital Bookshelf you’ve always been meaning to do. Or organizing your photos, or your parent’s photos, or writing that cool app you wish you had time for, or whatever it might be. I notice that a lot of them spend a lot of time talking about the “will” and “should” and a lot less time talking about what happens once they start or when they’re in mid-cycle. I hope to clear some of that up here about my digital bookshelf project.

I am now some months into it, well into maintenance mode. I’m pleased to report that I haven’t given up, and it’s actually working for me. I have a path for pretty much all paper that enters the house. It comes in and goes through junk filtering. Junk gets tossed, the interesting stuff gets sat on the desk next to the scanner, generally unopened. Magazines go in the magazine basket, never to be seen again (except by the 1 year old, who eats them), catalogs go in the recycle bin before my wife can see them, anything with an account number, name, etc. go in the pile to be checked for scanning and shredding. Once or twice a week, I go sit down, open the envelopes and repeat the junk filtering above. Any offers, especially credit offers, are shredded. I have enough to keep my life busy. Statements are scanned and then put on the shredder for later batch shredding. DMV and periodic payments are scanned and then put on the same pile. This accounts for most of the things that come in. Afterward, I shred the paper and it’s done. The next phase is done on the laptop.

On my particular laptop (MacBook Pro), I installed a bit called MarcoPolo, which lets me have things happen when it things you’re in a particular place. So the next time I open the laptop at home, it will go get those scans off the network share and put them in my Pending Documents directory. Next time after that I open Yep, I have a list of files to be tagged and dealt with. The statements are generally a one-step into Quicken in my VMware Fusion Windows XP Quicken Box (longer article pending there), where I put in the amounts and hit send once I’ve done them all. Easy. Then I put the tags on those files and they’re no longer “new”. Sometimes, when I’m filing without quicken up, I just tag them “todo” and come back to them later. It’s quick enough I usually do it all at once. Once this is done, I’ve pretty much dealt with everything on the pending list. Occasionally I’ll get a bill that’s due some months out (Car insurance, etc.) and they get put in the Scheduled Transactions in Quicken, to be sent either automatically within 2 weeks beforehand or whatever.

I have another thing that I’ve learned to do for forms that I fill out occasionally. I picked up a ScanSnap for my mac, and it came with an older version of Adobe Acrobat Pro. I scanned in the form for my flexible spending plan and turned it into a form to turn in our babysitting and health stuff. So now I go type a couple amounts, print, sign, and fax. If I had thought ahead enough to sign it first, I could probably just email it in, but that has other dangers. Fax is more obscure if nothing, so I’ve stuck to that for now.

So the tagging itself for documents hasn’t changed much. I have added a new category called Articles that covers newspaper clippings, interesting bits PDF’d off the internet, etc. that I want to keep static and offline. Otherwise, things are just as I’ve described before. The whole process from start to finish takes less than 10 minutes for each step, done maybe once or twice a week in three steps. Heck, I don’t even have to remember to download the files anymore, saving me a serious step (rsync to an unmounted network share via auto-launched Applescript – beautiful).

Remind me to write up more on what I do with MarcoPolo, I’m very pleased with it once it’s configured, but I hate the configuration.