Paperless Infrastructure

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Businesses have much to gain by moving to paperless communication with their customers. Just think how much money credit card companies could save if even 5% of their customers switched to paperless communication. The problem is that most companies seem to get the whole idea of “paperless” wrong. Their solution for people who want to be paperless is that they will send you an email notifying you that you have a statement. Then you can log into their website and download the statement as a PDF. This is about equivalent to having a mailman who knocks on your door to tell you there is a letter for you at the post-office.

This reflects a type of arrogance (or stupidity) that is typical of today’s big businesses. It works just fine for customers who don’t do business with other companies. But consider a customer who works with 10 different companies. Every month they have to log in and download statements from all these different companies. It simply does not scale. From the companies’ standpoint, they don’t care about the other companies you interact with and would just as soon have you do business with only them.

The reason businesses are hesitant to send you statements through email is because email is insecure. Theoretically, someone might be able to intercept the traffic and see your email. Of course, people could open your mailbox and take a peek at your phone bill as well, so in practice, it isn’t any less secure than the mail.  Sprint seems to recognize this and they are happy to send you bills as PDFs in an email message.

There are ways to make it secure using public/private keys. You give your bank a public key. They encrypt your statement with this key and send it to you. Only your private key (which isn’t shared with anyone else) can decrypt it.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people using email aren’t using any type of encryption, so a lot of companies don’t even try to design systems that take advantage of secure email communication. For customers, this type of system is ideal. Your bank sends you a statement. It shows up in email and you simply drag it to your electronic file cabinet. The only better way would be for your document repository to talk directly to your bank and fetch the documents without even going through email.

Much of what is holding back paperless communications is a lack of encryption and digital signatures. The technology exists, but it just hasn’t become prevalent enough to make it useful on a wide scale. It is kind of like being one of the first 10 people with a fax machine. Once the novelty wears off and you tire of sending messages to the other 9 people, it doesn’t do you much good.  It only becomes really useful when everyone has one.

Part of the problem is that most companies who supply digital signatures are trying to make a profit. This isn’t a bad thing, but they are aimed at other companies who are willing to pay a lot for their services. There aren’t many companies out there who are trying to sell encryption to home users because there isn’t much demand. Of course, until people use it, companies won’t offer it as a way to communicate with customers. So basically, there won’t be any demand until the demand exists–a classic “chicken and the egg” problem.

I think the best solution would be for some type of non-profit company to really start trying to spread encryption in an effort to help make the world more paperless.  It could even be a “green” non-profit that is trying to reduce the amount of paper consumed.  This wouldn’t be a bad role for the government because it is basic infrastructure for doing business.  Of course, they would probably want to keep some type of back door access to read your emails and the results would probably be a bureaucratic nightmare.

What are the roadblocks you see toward adopting paperless practices?
Originally published July 14, 2008.

New Fujitsu Scanner

If you’ve been following my paperless office experiment,  you  might be interested in Fujitsu’s new ScanSnap model.  The S1500M for Mac and S1500 for Windows looks to replace the 500 line.  Most of the specs are similar, but the 1500s have some more advanced paper handling and sensing to prevent double feeds.

Digital Letterhead

PDF For Laywers has a nice discussion about the benefits of using a digitized letter head.  Basically he recommends creating a letter head that is part of your word processor template so you can print your letter and letter head together (to paper or to a PDF). Some good thoughts and worth a read for people experimenting with paperless offices.

Articles on Going Paperless

• 8 Tips for Going Paperless-Sheila Riley
  Now that technology offers so many different options for organizing documents and facilitating communication, using telecommunication instead of regular mail is a good option for many people. This article gives some ideas that were developed and used by the Blue Valley school district in Overland Park, KS.
• The Perils and Perks of Going Paperless-James Champy
  As technology advances, many companies, especially those in the health care field, have begun to move toward paperless systems. This article explains some of the benefits and drawbacks of moving to a paperless system.
• Going Paperless: Is It (Finally) Time?-Chad Dickerson
  This article explores the challenges that a person faces when switching over to a paperless system. The aspect of the paperless conversion that the author focuses on is the type of scanner that best fits this type of an adjustment.
• Going Paperless-Unclutterer
  Sometimes the things that would have never been thought possible in earlier years become a reality. Paperless communication is one of those things. This article talks about some of the paper clutter that can be eliminated with a scanner and a bit of time. The author also provides a helpful link to another article on going paperless.
• The Pain of Going Paperless-Gene Marks
  Even though technology can accomplish wonderful things and save tremendous amounts of time, it can also be overrated. As the author of this article points out, sometimes the old way of doing things is the more efficient way.
• Going Paperless-Small Notebook
  As paper clutter builds up, often so does a person’s level of frustration! The author of this article shares their method of keeping paper clutter down to a minimum by using a computer and scanner, while acknowledging that paper is still good for some things.
• Get Organized and More Efficient by Going Paperless-Money Blue Book
  Creating a paperless work space is, indeed, usually more efficient than its cluttered counterpart. The author of this article points out that, in addition to helping you cut down on mess, a paperless system enables a person to search through documents and keep from misplacing them as easily.
• Pushing Paper Out the Door-Hannah Fairfield
  In this article, the author tells how one family organized what would normally be processes that use paper into paperless systems. The high cost of ink in recent years has also made the use of scanners and computers for storing information an attractive proposition.

The Problem With Media

One evening I’m reading a hard cover book.  The next morning when I get in my car, I start playing the audio version through the car stereo at the point I left off.  While waiting for a lunch appointment, I read a few more pages off my cell phone.  Later on at gym, I listen to 15 minutes of the book on my iPod. The next morning, I finish off the book on my eBook reader while on a long train ride.

If you haven’t figured it out, the paragraph above is pure fiction. It represents the way I want to consume media. While all of this is technically possible, publishers’ view of how people will read books doesn’t allow for this type of usage in any cost effective manner.  They will want to sell you one physical copy, one for your ebook reader, one audio copy, etc.

What is amazing is that even the places selling digital media don’t seem to get it right.  I purchased an eBook from Sony’s store.  Before I read it, they came out with an updated version.  If I want to read that, I’ll need to purchase it again.  With physical books, we expect that.  After all, we are getting something physical and if we want another one, we’ll need to get something physical again.  In the digital world, the cost of a new copy is practically zero.  It would seem like a no-brainer to give people updated copies of books they have purchased if the cost is nil.

Sadly, after seeing the editing process at a major book publisher, I shouldn’t be surprised.  I was working with a client who was publishing a book with Simon and Schuster. I was curious what type of process they would have for editing the book.  Here is the process:

1. Book is written and sent to publisher.
2. Publisher prints it out and marks up some changes.
3. Physical pages are sent to author.
4. Author looks at markup and makes additional changes and suggestions.
5. Writer has the foresight to copy the manuscript before sending it back.
6. Manuscript gets lost.
7. Writer sends photocopy.
8. Editors take manuscript and randomly make some of the changes that were marked up.
9. New copy of manuscript is sent back to author.
10. Author goes back through remarking changes that were made to original manuscript.
11. Author undoes changes that weren’t part of markup on original manuscript.
12. Book sent back to editor.
13. Repeat 8 through 12 a few more times.

I expected that, at the very least, they would be emailing Word documents back and forth with the “track changes” option enabled.

After I saw how things were working, it pretty much shattered my hopes of being able to buy a book that is portable across different types of devices as described above anytime within my lifetime.

So how would content be accessible in your perfect world?

Jamming Paper Shredders

After a large batch of scanning items into my paperless office, my shredder seemed to be jamming more than normal for my assistant. After helping her clear the stuck paper I got to wondering if there is a way to minimize the jams.  Fellowes claims they have created a jam proof shredder.  It look like it basically just stops before the paper gets packed in so tight that you can’t remove it.  Has anyone used one of these?  Do they work very well?

DevonTHINK’s Classify Feature

As part of my paperless office experiment I’m finding that scanning is actually the easiest part of the whole setup. A lot of what is difficult is finding a workflow that makes sense.  For example, if your assistant scans in 250 documents from your file cabinet, you need some way to classify and organize those into your system.  Obviously you can look at each one and figure out where it goes, but this is very slow.

DevonTHINK has a feature that helps with this.  It looks at the text in the document you want to classify and then looks at the text of documents already in the system. Then it suggests a location that puts it with similar documents.  This is extremely useful–especially when dealing with bills.

In this video I do a brief demo of how this classification system works.  I’m trying to make the videos a bit more usable, so let me know if this is an improvement over the others or not.

The video is a bit on the rough side, but I wanted to go ahead and get it put up to get some feedback from readers. I’m planning on doing some more with a better camera and in a better controlled environment. (I’m not sure if you can see me trying to shoo the dog away that is trying to rest his wet nose on my leg.)

How to Make an Insanely Simple Paperless Filing System

This is a guest post by Arjun Muralidharan, author of The Productive Student, a new blog about productivity for college students and all productivity buffs.

Mark’s paperless project has always been a favorite of mine to follow. He uses DevonThink to manage incoming documents from his Fujitsu ScanSnap.

It’s a good system, but for me, it lacks two things:

1. It doesn’t handle all my files, such as Word documents, Keynote presentations and other file types well.
2. Third-party software independence.

In accordance with GTD, I like to have a comprehensive system that’s cross-platform and can live independently from software such as DevonThink.

While a system with DevonThink will work for many of you, I’m sure some of you out there will value a more flexible, portable system.

Here’s my filing system, using just Mac OS X and Quicksilver, and optionally, Leap.

The System

Single Alpha System

I have hanging folders for each letter of the alphabet as my physical storage system. I find this system works extremely well, as far as retrieval is concerned. There’s a maximum of 26 places I can look for in the worst case, usually you can narrow it down to 3 or 4.

It takes 10 minutes to make but is extremely easy to navigate as you’ll see.

This system resides within a Reference folder. This folder practically holds my entire life.

Filing Stuff

This is where Quicksilver comes into play. Quicksilver can be described as a launcher for Mac OS X, but it basically provides instant access to a lot of functionality and interaction with files. You can get it at Blacktree Software.

Let’s take a typical scenario:

You have file that’s landed in your inbox, either by downloading it from the internet, an email attachment, or a direct PDF scan from your scanner. Here, I have an eBook version of George Orwell’s 1984.

I want to achieve the following: Put the file into my system in a folder named “eBooks”.

Two problems arise:

1. The folder eBooks doesn’t exist yet.
2. Conventionally moving a file is a pain in the backside.

With Quicksilver, it’s easy:

1. Highlight the file with your mouse (click once).
2. Invoke Quicksilver.
3. Type “E” to go to your “E” folder.
4. Press Tab, and type “N” to select the “New Folder” command.
5. Press Tab again, and type “eBooks”, and Enter to create the folder.
6. Now type Command+G to drop your highlighted file into Quicksilver.
7. Press Tab, and type “M” to choose the “Move to…” command.
8. Press Tab and type “E” to go to the E-Folder.
9. Use the arrow keys to drill down to the “eBooks” folder, and hit Enter.

While the instructions seem lengthy, once you get used to it you’ll find it extremely fast and comfortable to do. The last two steps are necessary because Quicksilver will not have indexed your newly created folder yet, so you have to manually drill down. No big deal.

Retrieval

Finding a file is extremely simple, thanks to Mac OS X and the OCR software included with most scanners these days, including the Fujitsu ScanSnap. Since the files are simply living as normal files within the OS, Spotlight search finds them with ease.

Hmm… I had that cool novel about Big Brother… what was it called?

Ah, there it is!

That’s my portable filing system. It’s flexible, cross-platform, and I can whack all my files on a thumb drive and walk to Windows as well. If you enjoyed this, be sure to stay tuned to Mark’s blog right here and my new blog over at The Productive Student.

5 Tips for Dealing with Mail

Everyone gets mail. It can consume a lot of your time, effort and storage space to process and store. Here are 5 tips to help you manage your incoming mail.

1. Open your mail over a trash can.
   This simple tip can help make sure that any mail that doesn’t belong in your house gets taken back out. If you have a trash can outside, that may be an even better place to open it. This is a particularly good way to make sure that the envelopes and generic mailings don’t clutter up your work area.
2. Get off the lists.
   If a company has you on their mailing list, but you don’t want to receive anything else from them, simply ask to be taken off. It is better for the company, better for the environment, and will save you time in the long run.
3. Be careful what you do with personal information.
   Back to the idea of opening the mail over the trash: Do not simply throw away mail that has personal information on it. Credit card applications shouldn’t just be trashed, they need to be shredded or otherwise destroyed. Think in terms of “What would someone be able to do if they had this information?” Even if it seems harmless, think about what they could do if they put that information together with the other information you throw out over the course of a month.
4. Throw away extra sheets of paper.
   Next time you get a bank statement in the mail, look at how much you don’t really need. Usually there is a single page with the important info for your records, a page of advertising, a second page that contains not useful information, and sometimes even more pieces of paper that are useless to you. If you can throw away (or shred) those extra sheets before you even try to process your mail, it will save you time and helps make sure you aren’t storing useless information.
5. Online statements.
   It doesn’t work for everyone, but consider going to online statements. Most places don’t have a good infrastructure for sending you statements by email, so it might take more time than it is worth to log in to a bunch of different websites. But if most of your mail comes from one place, it might be worth considering for that one place.

Quick Paperless Update

My paperless experiment is going well.  Most of my incoming paper gets filed in DevonTHINK and I’ve been very happy with the the results.  DevonTHINK will let you do stuff like put the same file in two folders.  Once you get a number of documents in the right folders, DevonTHINK can automatically suggest where to put new incoming documents.  This is surprisingly helpful and extremely accurate.

The ScanSnap is good with flat paper, but sometimes has trouble with items that have been folder (think anything that comes in the mail).  I’m contemplating looking for a higher end scanner just to simplify the scanning process.  It isn’t bad, but it isn’t a smooth as I’d like it to be.

Paperless Office

These links and summaries about going paperless were compiled by my assistant in India. (In an upcoming article I’ll be talking about what it is like to work with a virtual assistant.)

• 6 tips for a ‘paperless’ office - Joseph Anthony
  People get greater return on their hardware, software and technology investments while they partially get rid of the paper clutter. The author focuses on 6 basic things that one has to remember while moving to a paperless office. The reader gets the pointers to remember while shifting to a paperless home or business office; he is also familiarized with the benefits.
• Acrobat to a Paperless Office - Julie Starr
  This article focuses on the benefits of technology for moving to a paperless office. In comparison to any other software, author vouches for Acrobat. The wide range of built-in capabilities would enable the user to add annotations, track reviews, merge multiple PDF files, or add custom headers and footers. Illustrative examples are given to familiarize the reader with the various acrobat options available. The benefit of using acrobat is huge in comparison to the shortcomings pointed out by the author.
• The Concept of the paperless office (d,a,n) - Maricon Williams
  The article brings to light the motive of different authors in having a paperless office. While we foresee an office without paper, the benefits involved cannot be overlooked. The author discusses on three advantage involved in having paperless office but at the same time also alerts the reader of the risk involved. The author’s viewpoint is also featured along with the opinion of many authors on this subject.
• Rethinking Paperless: Efficient Alternatives For The Not-So-Paperless Office - Bill Brikiatis
  While one desires to set up an office with less paper or paperless, few questions are bound to attack. The author has presented his viewpoint on this subject in the form of question and answer. From the feasibility of the idea to cite an example of a firm, which has successfully moved to become paperless has been mentioned in this article. Opinion on usage of apt tool is shared by the author that can minimize the paper-clutter and thereby enhance service efficiency.
• The real paperless office - Joe Kissell
  You might be lost when you are asked to aim for paperless office. This article acts as a guide to help you set it up with more ease. Based on personal experience, the author lists the steps involved in having an organized office with less paper. The reader gets enlightened on selecting the right hardware, software with appropriate configurations and the best suited process.
  

Paperless with the Kindle

James Harris has some interesting thoughts on going paperless when it comes to magazines. In particular he looks at how his Kindle has changed the way he reads. I have a Sony Reader which uses a similar screen and I agree with him that it is a very pleasurable way to read. Here are some quotes from his post.

We are really very close to having a paperless society that pundits have talked about every since I can remember. People always exclaim they hate reading off the computer screen even though they spend hours a day doing so. Now the Kindle offers a better way to read, even better than paper, and that starts to suggest going paperless is possible.

I’m a little less optimistic. I think we have a long ways to go before the infrastructure for really being paperless is in place. I agree that all the technology is there, but things have to hit a critical mass before they really become useful and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Paper is still very inexpensive. The used paperback I bought for $1.00 is very durable and I could go through 300 of them before approaching the cost of an electronic reader. Even more important, the books still retain some value after I read them. I can give them away, sell them, or trade them in for other reading material.

I think electronic readers would start making sense if a $15 book was now $3 or $4, but they aren’t. Publishers are trying to keep the prices only slightly lower than the print editions even though they are basically one-time-use.

Consider a DVD, you can buy it for $15 or rent it for $2.50. (I know that technically you can read your electronic book again, but in actual use you probably won’t read an electronic book over and over again.) The use of an electronic book is more in line with renting a DVD. However, to buy a book for the Kindle, you’ll pay $10 while a hardback will typically cost $15 to $17. Paperbacks will usually run a bit less and if you buy the book used it can be substantially less. You read the book and then eventually delete them if you run out of space on the Kindle–or you keep it around indefinitely. With the physical book, you can resell it, if you purchased it used, you’ll probably only be out the shipping costs to purchase it–maybe a bit more. You can share your ebook with other people who you trust to use your $300 digital reading device, but that is about it–oh and you can’t read something else while they read it.

When it comes to magazines and newspapers the economics are a bit different. A newspaper typically has very little value a few days after it is published (unless you keep birds and need something to line the cage). So there is pretty much no resell value in a newspaper and it is unlikely that you will loan the paper to someone else. The Wall Street Journal on the Kindle costs $10 per month. At $120 per year it is about the same cost as the physical edition along with the online access option.

I feel like I’m getting more for my money with paper but I actually read more stories when I get the Kindle edition.

That is an interesting observation. Based on the numbers above, he is getting more for his money when buying a book. It would probably be a better test to see how he feels in 18 months after the novelty of the Kindle wears off a bit. One of the nice things about something like the Kindle or Sony Reader is that they are limited use devices. When you try to read on your computer it is easy to jump around opening other browser windows, looking things up, and clicking on interesting advertisements or links. The electronic readers are much more focused on reading, so it tends to be easier to read longer stretches at a time with them than on the computer.

An interesting side note is what Steve Jobs said about reading books on the iPhone. He basically said, “people don’t read any more”. Interestingly enough people do still buy books. So even if reading is going down book purchases are still going well. But if people are buying books they aren’t reading, they are probably going to be more interested in something that will sit on their bookshelf than a file that other people can’t see.

Do you use a digital reader of some type? What do you think it would take for digital books to really take off?

Group Interview - Dealing with Paper

We asked a number of professional organizers to be part of a three question interview. This is the first of those questions that we will be publishing over the next few weeks. Thank you to everyone who participated and shared their perspective.

What is the single most important tip you would give to someone who is having trouble managing all the paper in their lives?

“Recycle most of it as soon as it comes in the door.”
Melissa Michaels from The Inspired Room (rss)

My trash can is right next to the mailbox. I’ve found that I can often get by without even bringing junk mail into the house. I’ve heard other people recommend that you open your mail over the trash can or recycle bin to help make it easier to throw things away by making it the default behavior.

Stop doing everything you are doing at the moment of complete mental breakdown. Take a large breath, put on some fun music and start sorting. Pile every single paper in one spot, grab the nearest empty trash can and sort into three sections: TRASH, PROJECTS, TO FILE. Trash goes into the trash can, your To File pages go into a designated area and your Projects or To Do’s sit nicely next to wherever you are going to work on them at. Once the chaos is gone, it will be a lot easier to implement a system that is customized to your organizing style: Inspirational, Logical, or Visual.
Suzanne Babb from Let’s Talk Organizing (rss)

Good point. I think a lot of people keep trying to plug away operating an very low efficiency because of their mental and physical disorganization.

Keep as little paper as possible in the first place by setting up an effective system for the complete lifecycle of your paper. I also have a Paper Retention Guide which advises on what papers to keep and for how long in a very easy to read and reference chart format. All of my guides can be accessed at www.neatandsimpleguides.com
Ariane Benefit, M.S.Ed. from Neat and Simple Living (rss)

When I’m working with clients on technology needs, I encourage them to think about the the entire lifecycle of the technology they purchase. For example, when they create a plan to buy a computer, they should also create a plan for how they are going to replace and dispose of it in the future. Ariane’s suggestion is to do the same thing for paper and think in terms of how the paper comes in, what happens to it and when it eventually goes out. When you think in these terms it is much easier to design your system effectively because it maps to your plan.

Ask yourself “Do I really need this?” before hitting the “print” button or bringing flyers or other printed information back to your home or office.
Janet Barclay from From the Desk of Janet Barclay (rss)

Something that I use with businesses that are trying to lower printing costs is to make it “hard” to print. For example, putting a shared high speed printer in the workroom instead of giving everyone their own inkjet printer reduces printing cost by being more efficient and because people are less likely to print something they don’t need if they have to go into the other room to get it.

Have less of it. Be ruthless and selective about the paper you bring into your life, whether it’s mail, free publications or otherwise. That might sound like a generalization, but having less paper means less time managing it.
Brandie Kajino from The Home Office Organizer (rss)

This is a very important point for paperless systems as well. Just because it is easy to scan something doesn’t mean you should keep it. I think it is easier to manage the scanned documents than the paper ones–at least it scales much easier. But at the same time, it is easier to manage 1,000 digital documents than 100,000.

Limiting free publications is pretty important too. There are a number of magazines available that don’t actually charge any type of subscription fee. They want as much distribution as possible because they make money of advertising. While these can be good sources of information, it is easy to start collecting more subscriptions than you can possibly read. I have recently started switching to short newsletters for my reading. They are typically much more expensive, but the information is much more concise and focused.

Portable Scan Snap S300

Fujitsu has released a portable version of the ScanSnap line of scanners.  It can run on its own power cable or use power from the USB connection.  This is particularly useful if you are traveling or working of your laptop with a battery.

When running off the USB power it is a little slower to scan. When plugged into its own power connection it can handle 8 pages per minute.

The S300 is only for Windows.  It is fairly new, so they may release a S300M version sometime in the future.  You can buy the S300 from our online store for $291.

Another Scanner

A reader pointed me to the Fujitsu 6140.  It is faster than the Scan Snap at 80 to 120 ppm (each side counts as one page) and seems to be a little more heavy duty in its construction.

It looks like it uses dual rollers where the Scan Snap 510 and 510M only use one.  This might help guard against misfeeds and paper jams.

The 6140 comes with Kofax workgroup software that will handle some scanning tasks including processing bar codes scanned on documents.  The scanner appears to only support the Windows platform.

The 6140 is quite a bit more expensive with a list price of $1999.  You can get it in the Productivity501 Store for $1,660.

Online Backup Options

I’ve been trying out several online backup tools. I plan to write in more detail about my experiences with each one later, but here is an overview.

My wife and I travel quite a bit. While I can take an extra hard drive with us for backups, but this seems a bit pointless since the biggest threat to my equipment is probably theft. If someone breaks into my hotel room and steals my laptop, they probably aren’t going to overlook an external hard drive. I need a solution that will give me quick access to all my information if my computer is stolen or damaged.

Here are three services I’ve tried.  If you have any suggestions of other services I should check out please post them in the comments.

.mac Backup

This would seem like the ideal solution, but until recently .mac accounts only came with 1 GB of storage space. They recently upped this to 10 GB. This is more useful, but it doesn’t take long to fill it up. On the plus side of things, it can be scheduled to run automatically to keep your backup up-to-date.

The .mac Backup software will also allow you to backup to DVDs, CDs and external HDs. So I could conceivably come up with a plan that backs large files that don’t change much up to external media while storing all of my documents that are smaller but change frequently online.

As I move toward a paperless office, my storage needs are just going to go up and I don’t think .mac Backup is going to be able to keep pace. I’m still using it for backing up certain documents just for added redundancy, but I’m not using it as my main backup system.

Mozy

Mozy is an interesting idea. For about $5 per month you can backup everything on your computer. (I have heard that in reality they have a limit of 50 GB of online storage space.) Mozy has a nice looking client that installs and lets you setup your backup to run automatically. However, I was never able to get it to backup more than about 20MB at a time. After weeks of emailing them for support I finally gave up. I have heard that their Windows product is much more stable, but I haven’t tested it. Support said that other OS X users were not having problems.

If you have a PC this might be worth looking into as it is fairly inexpensive.

They also offer a business class service that can backup databases and email servers.

Jungle Disk and Amazon S3

Jungle Disk doesn’t actually store any of your data. They just make a product that allows you to upload your data to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a storage service with a pay-as-you-go pricing setup. You pay $0.15 per GB of storage space. So 20 GB of storage will cost you about $3. You also have to pay for your transfers. That is an additional $0.10 per GB transfered into the system and $0.18 per GB transfered out. There is also a $0.01 charge for each PUT, GET, or LIST request.

Jungle Disk automatically keeps track of what changes on your system and uploads a new version of the file whenever necessary to keep the online copy up todate. If make changes to huge files every day, you’ll pay more than if you make changes to small files because the entire file has to be uploaded–not just the changes.

My experience in uploading around 20 GB of data and running a backup for about a week was in the $15 range for the month. Obviously a good deal of the expense is just getting the data uploaded the first time. After the first month I’d expect to pay $5 to $10 per month to Amazon.

The Jungle Disk program is $20 and that gives you a license to install it on as many computers as you like. It works with Windows, Linux and Mac so it is a pretty good deal if you have multiple machines.

Jungle Disk recently came out with an added service that gives you additional capabilities.  Most notable is the block level backup.  If you change a file the software will figure out what is different between the file on your computer and the one on the server and upload just the changes.  If you make a lot of changes to large files this can really reduce the amount of bandwidth required to keep the server in sync.

Don’t forget if you have any suggestions of other services to try, I’d love to hear about them.

Letting Go of Paper

I’ve been surprised at how difficult it is to let go of my paper. As I move more and more of my paper to a digital format I keep finding myself hesitating when I get ready to shred a document. We are trained so very well to keep our paper records. Has anyone else experienced this?

I think part of the issue is that most people have suffered some type of data loss with their computer. Even though I have multiple systems in place for backup I’m still haunted by losing important files years ago. Another issue is the physicalness of paper. You can hold paper in your hand. Spread it out. Write notes in the margin, etc. Not that I ever do that with my car insurance statement or gas bill, but somehow the idea of having something physical is comforting.

Little by little I’m training myself to let go. One trick I’ve found is to not shred the paper right away. I simply put it on top of the shredder to shred later. My daughter’s sleeping schedule was the original reason for this habit, but it is easier to give myself a few hours–just in case I think of some reason a document needs saved. So far I haven’t come up with any reason to save something that I was planning on shredding, but it makes me feel more comfortable.

My files have stopped growing and are starting to shrink!

Text and Image Documents

There are two basic types of documents you can use in a paperless office.  The first type of document is text based.  These are formats like .TXT .RTF .DOC, etc.  These store text as editable information.  You can go in and change the document, fix spelling, copy sentences, etc.

The second type of documents are image based documents.  These include formats like .TIF, .JPG, .PNG, .GIF, etc.  These documents just represent a bunch of pixels.  The computer can’t edit the words themselves other than by deleting pixels and putting new pixels down.  You can’t copy a sentence and paste it into another program if you are using this format.

The advantage of the text based formats are the fact that they can be searched.  If the document contains the word “Smith Contract” a search on your computer for those words should show the document in the results.  With image based documents you don’t have that luxury.  If you want to be able to find it, you better name it using the keywords you might use for your search, put it in a directory with the name you will search for, or associate meta information with the document containing all the keywords you might use.

The advantage of image based documents is the way they preserve the layout and non-text elements.  If you have to go to court to show someone signed a contract, you are going to want to have an image based document with their signature. (There are some ways to do things with digital PKI signatures that will stand up in court, but that gets quite a bit more complicated.)

Of course the problem is, you may have a hard time locating the particular contract unless you were particularly careful where and how you saved it.

The PDF format solves many of these issues.  PDFs allow you to store a document as an image AND as text.  Think of it as two layers,  you have a text layer that contains the words in a computer readable format and you have the image layer that contains a picture of the document–including any pictures, annotations, etc.  So if you want to search for a keyword it acts as a text based document.  If you need to print out a copy of the document it acts as an image based document.

When you scan your document you want to make sure both types of information is recorded.  To get text information from a scanned document, you need to use some type of optical character recognition.  Usually your scanner will come with some type of OCR software.  Many scanning programs will automatically add the text layer into a PDF.  The newer versions of Acrobat have OCR capabilities built in so you can take image based documents and add the text layer with a few clicks.

In my workflow, my scanner sends the image of each document directly to a program that  performs some optimizations, does OCR and then saves the results as a PDF in my document repository.

If you are looking at setting up a paperless office, you will need to consider how the character recognition takes place.  The more you are able to automate the process the easier it will be to work with.

Note: If you are creating a PDF directly from your computer, there is a way to skip the image layer while still preserving the layout of the page.  If you start adding signatures and markups it will create an image layer to put those items in.

Last Night

Last night I got a new electronic book device.  It was the size of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper and had 600 dpi resolution.  The quality was excellent.  It worked in bright sunlight without a problem.

I put all my scanned documents on it and found it was just as easy to read them as it was on paper and it was even easier to navigate and find documents than using the filing cabinet.  I loaded it with all the PDF articles I wanted to read and found it worked flawlessly.

Then I woke up.

I was very disappointed.  Should I be concerned that I’m now dreaming of becoming more paperless?

Is Acrobat a Necessity for a Paperless Office?

As work toward creating a paperless office, I’m coming to the conclusion that Acrobat is a necessity. Not the free version but the multiple hundreds of dollars standard version. This isn’t a problem for me because my ScanSnap came with Acrobat 7 Standard. I was hoping to find that there was enough capabilities built into OS X or free tools to have something less expensive to recommend.

Here are the things that I can’t find good ways to do outside of Acrobat:

1. Rearrange Pages - And Acrobat isn’t great at this, but I can extract, remove, rearrange, or add pages as needed. In 7 it isn’t particularly user friendly, but it is a whole lot easier than any other way I’ve found to handle it.
2. Sign Documents - I haven’t found a good solution for digital or graphical signatures.
3. Filling in Documents - Acrobat provides a Typewriter tool that basically lets you type anywhere in the document even if it wasn’t saved as a form. (If it was saved as a form you can fill it in using the free version of Acrobat.)
4. Compressing PDFs - OS X has a built in process to compress PDFs, but it barely makes any noticeable difference. Acrobat can make a significant change in the size of the file.
5. Editing Existing Text - Acrobat will let you edit existing text. So if you find an error in a file that you saved as a PDF, you can just make the change. This only works for small changes like fixing a spelling error. If you try to start removing entire paragraphs it probably won’t look right.

Are there other tools that allow you to do all of this other than Acrobat?

Using Acrobat to Sign Documents

Acrobat is capable of doing two types of signatures.  Technically the best way is using a digital signature.  Not only can the signature show that you signed it, but it can also prove that the document wasn’t changed after you signed it.  If you deal with a lot of people who use digital signatures, this is a great way to go.

Personally when I sign something it is usually to fax or mail.  While I like the digital signature idea I just don’t interact with enough people who could actually use it.

Originally I was signing documents in Acrobat by creating my own digital signature and then attaching an image to the signature.  Acrobat will use the image anywhere you place the digital signature so things look normal when you print it.

While this works, it can take a bit of effort to setup.  You have to generate a public and private key and then import them into Acrobat, etc.  Also when you sign something Acrobat adds an additional graphic showing that it is a digital signature.  This doesn’t show up when you print it, but it can be confusing for someone who gets the PDF.

Today I discovered another feature in Acrobat called “stamps”. This is a way to stamp parts of the document with an image like “Confidential”, “Past Due”,  “Top Secret”, etc.  You simply select the stamp and then you can go through your document just like you would with a rubber stamp.

It turns out you can import an image file and use it as a stamp as well.  If you follow the instructions from our post about how to create a scanned signature, you’ll find it imports nicely.  The transparent background lets you sign on a line without covering it up.

Once you apply the stamp you can use the tool to resize it or move it around for better placement.

To import your signature as a stamp go to Tools > Commenting > Stamps > Create Custom Stamps.

I am using Acrobat 7 Standard.  If you are using a different version there is probably a slightly different process. 

Tuesday’s Tip: Stop Communication You Don’t Need

Most everyone gets a barrage of emails, telephone calls, and physical mail that they don’t really need. I’m not necessarily talking about spam. I’m talking about newsletters from organizations in which you are no longer active. Donation requests from non-profits that you gave to years ago, etc.

Most people just accept the interruption and toss these items in the trash, but a better option is to try to stop them altogether. Taking a few minutes to send a note asking to be taken off their mailing list can save you a tremendous amount of time in the future. If you get a monthly newsletter in the mail that you identify, consider opening and then toss in the trash, it can easily take up a minute of your time. If you get 10 items like this each month you are wasting 2 hours a year on dealing with pieces of paper that you can stop from coming into your life in the first place.

Two hours over an entire year may not seem like much, but it is two hours you could spend doing something more important to you. You are also doing the organizations a favor by letting them save their marketing dollars for people who are interested in reading their newsletter.

Papers - Paperless Office for Academics

A helpful reader pointed me to Papers.  It is a well thought out program for managing academic papers on OS X.  I’ve looked it over briefly and it looks pretty impressive.  It integrates with  PubMed and other online repositories allowing you to search and download PDFs while autopopulating all the metadata fields.

Papers also allows you to take notes as you read articles and keep them with the PDF.  It seems to be setup for working with existing PDFs, so there doesn’t seem to be an built in OCR capabilities.

If you are looking for a way to organize your research Papers is worth checking out.

Resolution Matters for a Paperless Office

As part of my paperless experiment I’m slowly moving my data  to PDFs I’ve really started to notice the difference in resolution between my various computers.  I recently got a new laptop with a 17 inch 1920x 1200.  My previous laptop had the same sized screen but only 1440 x 900 pixels.

On my older laptop it was difficult to read a full sized PDF–especially if the print was small.  On my new laptop I’m finding that I can read print that was unreadable at the lower resolution.

Here is a screen shot from the older laptop with the lower resolution monitor:

If you are good at guessing you might be able to read it, but it is going to be difficult.  Here is the same size (relative to the screen) capture on the higher resolution monitor:

The text is still small but it is much easier to read.  Now I know looking at this post, the second example is much bigger, but keep in mind they are actually the same size on the two screens.  The second one is bigger because it has more pixels.  (I guess I should have enlarged the lower resolution one so you could see the comparison, but I don’t have photoshop installed on the new computer just yet.)
If you want to go paperless pay just as much attention to the resolution of the screen as you do to the physical size.

New SnapScan for OS X

It looks like there is a new SnapScan out for OS X. I think the scanner itself is about the same, but the new version includes Acrobat 8.0 instead of 7.0. If you are looking at purchasing the scanner, you may want to make sure you have aren’t getting the older version of the software.

The PC version has had Acrobat 8 since June.

Paperless Update

I have still been working on my paperless experiment, but most of my planning has revolved around trying to figure out how to keep from wasting money on something only to discover I have to buy something else.

I’ve also been working on the workflow side of things in trying to keep my documents digital and not simply revert to printing them out whenever I need to fax or sign them.  I have had pretty good luck with some online faxing services that I hope to write more about in another post.

Also I’ve had a chance to really challenge the ScanSnap scanner.  While it doesn’t compete with a $10,000 sheet fed scanner, I’ve been very impressed.  The other day my grandmother had about 450 photos in a box that I offered to scan for her.  There were all different sizes, some had sticky tape on the back, etc.  The scanner handled them very well.  It worked best with 10 to 20 at a time, but I was able to scan the entire box in about 20 minutes of reloading the scanner and then waiting for it to run.  She has another 4 boxes for me to scan now.

Another part of being paperless that I’ve been working with a lot is the backup process.  I’ve been looking at Apple’s Backup program, Mozy, and Jungle Disk.  Apple’s Backup program is ok, but you are very limited on the amount of storage space.  I haven’t been able to get Mozy to work.  I’ve been working with their tech support for over a month now and I’m just about to throw in the towel.  So far JungleDisk seems to be working well and I’ve been happy with it–once I got use to a few odd quirks.  I plan on doing a more detailed review of each of these a little later–hopefully after I get Mozy working.

Don’t forget about the Belkin Concealed Powerstrip Contest.  To enter you just have to sign up to get site updates via email.  (You can unsubscribe after the contest if you like.)

Amazon Kindle

Today Amazon released their ebook reader called Kindle. I have the original Sony Reader and I’ve been pretty impressed with it. The new version makes a few small improvements, but is still a similar device.

Even though the Kindle is based on the same e-ink technology, it takes a very different approach than Sony. One of the biggest differences it the way books are distributed. Kindle comes with built in EVDO networking. EVDO is the same technology used for high speed connections over the cellular network by Sprint and Verizon (AT&T uses something different). Instead of requiring users to get a data plan for their Kindle, Amazon packages the cost of the wireless service into the books they sell.

Most of the books look like they sell for $9.99, but the place where I think the Kindle will really shine is the magazine and newspaper subscriptions. Most of the time when I buy a book, I want to keep the physical copy on my shelf. There are some technical reference books that I don’t care to keep around because they are outdated so quickly, but for non-technical works I want to be able to pass them on to someone else, etc. Magazines and newspapers are different. I expect to throw these away when I’m done reading them.

The Kindle allows you to subscribe to major newspapers and magazines and they will be automatically downloaded to your device. This is pretty attractive. I was trying to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal last month only to find that they don’t deliver to this area. I would have had to wait a few days to get it through the mail, so I didn’t sign up. With the Kindle I could have it on my device first thing in the morning.

If you have Word documents you want to read, you can simply email them to the device. Amazon will take care of changing the formating when it transfers it over the wireless network. You pay a small fee for this transfer as you do when subscribing to blogs.

The device also lets you browse Wikipedia and it appears that this is done at no charge. Here are a few other highlights:

• The ability to search all of your content. (This is something that the Sony doesn’t do.)
• Full thumb style keyboard.
• Bookmark pages and take notes.
• Next and Back bars on the side, which try to mimic the actual turning of book pages.
• Memory slot for additional storage space.
• Purchases are backed up on Amazon so you can restore them if your Kindle is lost or stolen.
• Built in dictionary. You can highlight a word and see the definition. (I think this is a huge advantage.)

All in all it sounds like an excellent start for Amazon. My Sony Reader does what I need for now, so I probably won’t buy a Kindle for some time. For me the the “holy grail” of ebook readers is something that has a 8.5 x 11 screen and allows you to display PDFs. The would open the device up to people who have volumes of PDF documents–especially students dealing with journal articles.  It would also allow you to read documents you’ve scanned in from regular paper. The Sony Reader claims to read PDFs, but it is pretty much unusable. For the type of books you are likely to buy on Amazon the Kindle seems to really hit the mark.

On Scanning Your Signature

Several people have commented that scanning your signature is a bad idea because if someone got a hold of the file they could sign away everything you own.  Obviously you should keep the file private. I wouldn’t recommend attaching it to each of your emails or putting it on a web page or anything like that, but it is probably no more risky than anything else you do on a regular basis.

Consider the following:

1. If you ever write a check or sign a credit card receipt at a store, you are essentially handing a stranger a copy of your signature already.  They could easily digitize it using the process I’ve just shown and use to sign things as you.
2. Most of the time when you sign something, does anyone verify that it is indeed your signature?  Most stores don’t even verify that your signature matches the back of a credit card.  Someone could just as easily sign something as you using their own handwriting and it would probably slip through just fine.  If you apply for a credit card, they aren’t verifying your signature against anything.  If someone wants to get a credit card in your name, they aren’t going to need your signature to do it.
3. Anything important is going to require more than just a signature.  If you buy a house or something like that, they are going to require a notarized signature.  That means that someone verified you are who you say before sign the document.

I’m not saying that someone getting your signature couldn’t prove to be inconvenient, but I can’t think of much someone could do that they couldn’t do already.  Especially because most people’s signatures are widely distributed already and it wouldn’t take much effort to get a copy.

How to Create a Scanned Digital Signature

If you like this article you might also enjoy our post about how to use your signature to sign documents in Acrobat. We also have a number of other articles about going paperless that might be helpful.

If you want to create a scanned version of your signature, there are several ways to do it. The “right” way would be to send your signature to a company that will create a truetype font of your entire signature so you can print it at any size and still have the beautiful vector drawn lines.

The easy way to do it is to scan in your signature and remove the background. If you make it large enough and scan at a high enough resolution, you don’t have to worry about it looking bad when it gets printed.

I’m going to walk you through the “easy” way. I’ll be using Photoshop simply because you probably know someone who has it and wouldn’t mind doing this for you. I’m sure you can do it with other programs as well.

Note: When people talk about “digital signatures” they usually aren’t referring to a scanned version of your handwriting.  Digital signatures are an electronic way to prove that someone signed something even if the end product is being transmitted through a network where malicious people may try to tamper with it.

1. Sign a piece of paper

This is harder than it sounds because you’ll be very critical of the way it looks. I suggest signing with large letters. When you shrink it down, it will look better. I used a blue gel pen and got decent results. Sign a piece of paper several times and then scan it in. This will give you some options to choose the best looking image.

2. Scan the paper

You probably want to use a high resolution for best results. I wouldn’t go below 600 dpi.

3. Crop down to the best signature

You also may need to straighten the image at this point so it is level and will line up with horizontal lines on paper.

4. Use the magic wand to select the area around the signature

5. Invert the selection and copy

6. Paste the signature into a new document with a transparent background

7. Use the magic wand to remove any white still left inside letters.

8. Save the image in a format that supports transparent backgrounds.

I’d suggest using PNG. It can be imported into Acrobat, supports transparency, and doesn’t have problems with “artifacts” like some other formats. You don’t want to use JPEG because of the artifact problem.

So what can you use your scanned digital signature for?  Here are some suggestions:

• Email Signature - I’m not a big fan of using an image in an email signature, but I know a lot of people think it gives emails a nice personal touch.  If you do decided to use this in your email signature, be sure to send test messages to several email programs to make sure that it looks the way you expect.
• Digital Signature Representation - Acrobat can support digital signatures using public key infrastructure.  They also allow you to attach a digital representation of your signature–so there is an actual signature on the document even though the real legal weight is being handled by a bunch of numbers behind the scene.  This is particularly useful if you are sending a document with a digital signature to someone who may not be particularly technology savy.  They may not understand how the digital signature works, but they will have a signature that they recognize when they print the document out.
• Signing Faxes - This is on of my main uses for a scanned signature.  I can receive a fax, sign it and fax it back without ever printing the document out.

Dealing with Signatures in a Paperless Office

With email, one of the main reasons I have to print things off is to sign them and fax or mail them back.  As I transition to a paperless office I’m having to look at ways to sign documents without printing them out.

There are really two types of signatures.  The first is just an image of your handwritten signature.  The second is a digital addition to the file that “proves” you were the one that signed it.  By now digital signatures should be common, but they aren’t.  I’m not saying they aren’t used in big companies, but the average web user isn’t signing emails or anything else digitally.

Right now most of the paper that requires my signatures needs to be faxed to someone.  If I want to sign papers to buy some investment property, transfer my retirement account to a different broker or open a new savings account, I’ll have to sign a piece of paper and fax it back.  Using a digital signature does nothing if you are going to be sending the document over a fax machine.

So for most of my day to day use I need a way to put an image of my signature on a document. Acrobat gives you both the image and digital signature capabilities.  It can be a little tricky to setup, but once you get it working you can sign documents with ease.

They way I’ve done this so far is:

1. Create a image of my signature on a transparent background.  (I’ll talk about how to do this later.)
2. Create a self generated digital signature.
3. Add the digital signature to Acrobat.
4. Add an image to be used as the visual representation of the digital signature.

Once this is setup you can basically drag a box onto a document to add your signature.  If you save and email the document it has your digital signature.  If you fax it to someone, it has your visual signature.

Quick Update: Paperless Office

I am still working on my paperless office experiment. I’ve had an huge influx of consulting requests in the past 60 days, so I haven’t dedicated as much time to this as I had originally planned. Here is a quick update on what I’ve found so far.

Optical Character Recognition

One of the most important parts of being able to search for your documents later is recognizing it as text. A generic scanning process simply recognizes the pixels and doesn’t actually turn them into words. (A simple test to see if a PDF is storing data as pixels or text is to try to copy and paste a paragraph into a text editor.) I’ve found that for a proper workflow I need to make sure that the character recognition happens automatically as part of the scanning process.

Scan Snap Scanner

I purchased a Fujitsu ScanSnap and so far I’ve been impressed. It isn’t perfect and occasionally it misfeeds, but overall it has been a welcome addition to my tool set. I don’t have my document repository setup yet, but already it has made it easier to deal with documents that need faxed or emailed. The ability to scan both sides of a document at the same time is a significant advantage.

DEVONThink Pro Office

I’m still playing with the trial version of DEVONThink Pro Office. I had a personal edition, but the Pro Office version interfaces with the ScanSnap and will do OCR conversion automatically. I liked the idea behind DEVONThink, but I’m still more comfortable keeping my files in a hierarchy in the filesystem instead of in a database. DEVONThink offers some ways to help make this easier, but I’m not completely sold on it yet. I am still experimenting with it. I may like it better once I understand it more.

So there is a quick update. I’m still hoping to have my paperless office up and running by the end of the year. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

As always, please let me know if you have any suggestions that might help me out.

Paper that wants to be Shredded

Someone sent me this video of paper that wants to be shredded.

It reminded me of a client of mine. I was coming in to do some consulting so I asked for a copy of their organizational chart to get a better idea of how everything was organized. I carried it around with me throughout their facility for about a week as a reference. Often I’d set it down on a table or desk while talking with an employee.

When I really started looking at it in detail, I discovered that it had the salaries of all the executive level staff penciled in under their names! While it wasn’t a problem for me to know their salaries, they should have at least warned me about the additional information.

Shred Everything

Even before I started my paperless office experiment, I purchased a shredder. The about the amount of private information on the paper I was throwing out started to concern me when I realized that I had no idea where most of it was going.

The novelty of turning every random scrap of paper kept my normal waste basket empty for the first week. After this fascination wore off I started asking myself “Do I really need to shred this?”

Surprisingly, most of the time I found it was better to shred pretty much anything that came in the mail. Flyers and other mail that gets sent to everyone is spared from shredding, but most of the junk mail goes into the shredder. Here is some of my reasoning for some particular items:

• Fund raising letter from alma mater. I initially put it in the trash, but then dug it out and reduced it to confetti. I have seen some institutions ask you for the name of your college as part of a verification process, so if someone were digging through the trash to locate personal information, there is a chance it could be used to gain access to other private information.
• Envelopes of financial statements. Obviously I filed or shredded the actual statements, but the envelopes, themselves, could give an identity thief a good idea about where to start looking.
• Extended warranty information for my car. Since it identified my vehicle, I figured it could be used pieced together with other information to cause mischief.

Obviously this is being a little on the paranoid side of things, but if you get a decent shredder, the cost of shredding as opposed to trashing a piece of paper is minimal. In fact, it might be less because finely shredded material takes up less space than a can full of trash so you don’t have to empty it as often.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in getting a shredder is buying a machine that is too small for their needs. For me, personally, if I can’t take a credit card offer and reduce the entire thing into bits of paper without even opening the envelope, the shredder isn’t powerful enough. That means shredding all the paper and any fake plastic credit card they sent with the offer. If you have to manually run paper through it one or two sheets at a time, you’ve really messed up your workflow and made it much slower than what you had with a trash can.

I think my chances for identity theft from someone digging through my trash are probably very low, based on where I live. But it is possible that, as identity thieves become more sophisticated, the probability may go up. The less information about me that has gone out through the trash and sits who-knows-where, the better.

Components of a Paperless Office

I’ve been doing a lot of planning as part of my Paperless Office Experiment. The comments on my first post have been very helpful in guiding me in the right direction. If you have any suggestions or experiences, please share them.

The biggest portion of my planning has been in trying to identify the components necessary to make a paperless office workable. Simply adding a scanner won’t make you paperless. You have to have a system that works together as a whole not just a few random pieces of technology.

Here are the components I’ve identified as being necessary so far. I’d be interested in any input on things I may have overlooked.

Scanner

Most people start with a scanner when they think of a paperless office. While it is important, it is more important to identify how the documents are going to be handled once they are on the computer and then work backwards to determine the best scanner that is compatible with the software you plan to use.

Here are some of the things to look for in a scanner:

1. Automatic Sheet Feeding - If you are using a flatbed scanner it is going to be very tedious to handle multi page documents. Flat bed scanners are typically higher quality than sheet fed scanners, but they are much slower to use because you have to manually switch out pieces of paper. There are some flatbed scanners with additional equipment that give you a sheet feeder using the flatbed quality.
2. Duplex - You want to be able to read both sides of a document. Otherwise it is going to be difficult to piece your information back together once it is on the computer. Ideally you want a scanner that can read both sides of the paper at the same time.
3. Speed - If your are using a sheet fed scanner speed might not be quite as important. If you can just load 25 pages into it and then walk away it might not matter too much how long it takes. However, there are always going to be instances where you are trying to scan something that you need to use. In those cases, it is important to have a scanner that isn’t too slow. The faster your scanner the more likely you are to use it.

At this point I’m leaning toward a Fujitsu S500M SnapScan. It is less than $500 and seems to have most of the features I’ll need. And it came highly recommended in the comments on the original post.

Shredder

Once you scan a document you need an easy way to destroy it. There are a very wide variety of shredders on the market. For a paperless office you need something that can handle a reasonable volume and is fairly secure. Older shredders simply cut the paper into strips. These can be easily pieced back together. At the minimum you want a “confetti” shredder that produces pieces 1 inch by 1/4 inch. The ultra secure shredders reduce paper to a powder, but these usually run a few thousand dollars.

One of the things I look for in a shredder is the ability to shred unopened mail. I want to be able to stick the entire unopened envelope from a credit card application in it without needing to open it and handle each individual piece of paper. The ability to shred CDs and credit cards is also handy.

I already have a shredder. It is the Aurora AS1015CD that I got at Walmart. The closest thing I can find online is the Medium-Duty AS1018CD Confetti-Cut Paper Shredder. So far the only thing that caused it even a slight problem was bubble wrap.

(Yes I know you shouldn’t feed bubble wrap into a shredder, but since it hasn’t ever jammed, I’ve been growing curious as to just how much I can feed it before it has a problem. The bubble wrap didn’t really jam anything, it just got wrapped around the cutters and took a couple pieces of normal paper before it cleared itself off.)

Secure Hard Drive Storage

Going paperless means that all of your information is going to be in one centralized place. While this is convenient, it is an identity thief’s dream target. If your computer were lost or stolen you want to make sure that they would not have easy access to all of your bank accounts, retirement info, etc.

So ideally you want to encrypt your digital documents when you store them on your hard drive. These need to be saved in a way that even if someone steals your computer and gains access to the operating system, they could not access the files.

OS X has a feature called FileVault that does this. Your files are encrypted and a special password is assigned to them. After a period of not being used, it will prompt you to enter the password again before giving you access to the files.

Other operating systems have similar mechanisms and there are third party applications that give the same type of security. It is important to realize that this type of setup will prevent you from retrieving your files without the password. If you die, your spouse will not have access to any of your records unless you have shared your password. I would suggest keeping the password in a safe place like a lock box along with a physical piece of paper along with other important numbers just to be on the safe side.

Document Management System

This is really the cornerstone of your system. When you scan in a document you need some way to track it. It is possible to just use the file system as your document management system. OS X and Vista both provide a way to add metadata to files and this can be an effective way to track things. Spotlight and Vista’s search feature may be all that you need. Another alternative is to use Google’s desktop search to locate data.

While I like Spotlight, it has always seemed a little slow to me. Maybe when I upgrade to an Intel based processor I’ll be pleasantly surprised, but I’m planning on using an actual document management system for my needs.

One of the most important parts is having a mechanism to index the content of scanned documents. On many systems, scanning in a PDF results in a beautiful image of the page without any actual text data. That means unless you have tagged the file in some other way, you will never be able to locate it based on a search.

What you want is to have an invisible layer of text that is created through optical character recognition that is generated and kept as part of the PDF. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered my CanoScan LiDE 70 and the included software does this automatically. However, I’ve since discovered that most other systems require a manual step to make this happen.

If you have a version of Acrobat Standard (or better) you can scan to Acrobat and let it do OCR. I’m not sure how accurate Adobe’s OCR package is, but still this requires you to manually tell Acrobat to perform OCR.

I’m looking for a solution that will allow me to scan directly into my document management system and perform the necessary OCR steps transparently. I want to push a button and put the document directly into the document management system. I suppose if it prompts me for a title or keywords, that would be ok but I don’t want to have to go through a 2 or 3 step process on each piece of paper.

DEVONThink Pro Office has been recommended as a good solution, so I’m currently trying to figure out if it can handle this type of workflow.

Secure Backup System

With so much vital information being stored directly on my computer, I think I’m going to need to revamp my backup plan. I will probably keep DVDs or a hard drive in a lock box, but I’m considering the possibility of keeping an encrypted copy online, possibly using Amazon’s S3 service. .Mac has recently upgraded their storage limit, so it might be possible to keep an encrypted version of my documents synched with the .mac servers as another alternative.

High Resolution Monitor

Originally I used a 17 inch Powerbook with a 1440 x 900 screen and a 24 inch Dell monitor with a 1920 x 1200 screen. When I upgraded my Powerbook moved to a 1920×1200 built in display and a 30 inch 2560×1600 external monitor. The higher resolution isn’t so I can show an entire sheet of paper at only 5 inches tall. It does make it easier to read PDFs when I’m displaying an entire page on the screen and reduce the amount of time I have to spend scrolling around in a document. This is particularly important when dealing with multi column documents.

The 30 inch cinema display is large enough that you can display two pages side by side for easy reading and the 1920×1200 monitor on the laptop gives me high quality when I’m on the traveling.

Portable Paper Replacement Devices

One of the common uses of paper, is to take with you. For example, you might print out a map to take on the road, print out your flight information when going on a trip or print out an article to read on a plane.

I’m not sure if you can really replace paper when it is used in this way, but I have a few devices that I plan to try to use. The first is my Blackberry. The second is my Sony eBook Reader that uses digital ink technology. I think I’ll still feel safer having my map or flight information on a piece of paper, but we’ll see.

Digital Signature Solution

One of the big reasons I print documents out currently is so I can sign them and then fax them to someone. I’d like to find a good way to handle digital signatures on PDF documents. The simple way is to just scan in my signature, however Acrobat has some capabilities that allow you to sign or encrypt your document with your personal key which allows people to verify that you indeed signed the document. I don’t know much about what is possible at this point, but I’m looking for something that will give me a single way of dealing with signed digital document–whether they are being emailed to an insurance agent in the middle of rural Nebraska or a banker who has the most elaborate setup for verifying digital signatures.

If you have any suggestions or comments, please let me know. I’m trying to harness the collective experience of my readers to help me be successful while staying under my $1,000 budget.

Paperless Office Experiment

I’ve talked before about how the paperless office is still a dream. As I look around my desk right now, I have stacks of paper requiring my attention in various places. We are halfway through 2007. Seriously, weren’t we supposed to have flying cars and robots to do the dishes and fold the clothes by now? A paperless office seems like it should be normal by now, but it isn’t.

One of the things that has hindered the adoption of paperless technologies is the fact that they concentrate on the “paperless office” instead of focusing on a “paperless workflow”.  For example, if I have a paperless office that requires printing out incoming documents, signing them and then scanning them back in again, I have created more work for myself instead of less. A truly paperless office needs to provide some type of mechanism for dealing with these routine types of paper handling type tasks without creating more work.

I’m going to do an experiment and see just how paperless of an office I can create. I’ll keep the readers of Productivity501 updated on my progress and thoughts along the way. Hopefully the community will have some ideas to help steer me in the right direction. Here are the constraints:

1. I’m willing to spend up to $1,000. I’m trying to avoid solutions that would be out of reach for a normal home office. $1,000 might be a little on the high side for most people, but with technology getting cheaper, it seems like a reasonable place to start.
2. Must be convenient. I’m not willing to go paperless just for the sake of being paperless. It has to actually make my life easier. Just getting rid of storage space doesn’t make my life significantly easier. The retrieval and use of my documents must save me time.
3. Doesn’t have to be fully paperless. In keeping with the idea that it must be convenient, I’m going to assume that a completely paperless office is impossible. So this experiment is more about trying to see if an investment in paperless technology is worthwhile.
4. Reproducible by others. I make my living working with technology. This solution needs to be something that other people can realistically implement without a degree in computer science.
5. OS X & Linux. I don’t have anything against Microsoft, but right now I don’t use a Windows based machine, so the solution needs to work with my existing equipment.

I have a certain amount of equipment already. Here is a list:

1. Powerbook G4 17 inch. (plan to upgrade to MacBook Pro when the LED screens come out for 17 inch)
2. 24 inch Dell monitor.
3. Canon LiDE 70 Scanner
4. 250 GB External Hard Drive
5. Ubuntu Linux Desktop with 320GB hard drive.
6. Sony Ebook Reader
7. Blackberry 8700
8. Deskjet 970 Cse Printer

I’m looking for advice in this area so if anyone has any experience or suggestions for moving to a paperless office, please leave me a comment with suggestions or links to resources.