Moving, packing and unpacking should be ranked up there as effective ways of torture.
Truly everyone can agree that faced with any of the above tasks, you'd rather scrub the toilet, clean out that fridge, or even sit down and schedule all your bill payments for the next month. Having done all three gruesome exercises multiple times within the last 3 months, I have come to a decision that, really, I can do without a lot of things. Call it an epiphany or perhaps I am just sick of lugging stuff around, but seriously there's just too much stuff!
Oh the big items are the easy ones to deal with to organize.. but what about all the trinkets!! All the little pieces of memorabilia that I have collected over the years, ticket stubs to movies, Broadway show programs, letters (yes the good old pen and paper type), cards, yearbooks, magazines with articles that I believe I'll read again, what about those! Where do you put all that! Add to it, the records. Those dam records, I can't throw them away and they weigh a ton, easily taking up half of my small room. Organizing documents is one of the most time consuming (yet, sadistically satisfying) task which I've spent countless hours on. Scanning pages after pages into PDF format so I can get rid of the paper copies.
My little Umax Astra 3400 flatbed scanner has served me well over the years, hmm, has it been over 5 years? nevermind that, but it just won't do anymore. With all the advances in paperless billing, one would think the amount of paper received through the mail would be tremendously reduced -- Ehhh, wrong! Now more than ever, the paper just keeps on coming. Scanning using a flatbed simply takes too long. I need something with an automatic feeder to help me scan all the pages in quickly. Thus, brought me to another research project - find the ultimate affordable document scanner.
Fujitsu ScanSnap is one of the models that came up in my searches. Call it affordable is a stretch if you are on my budget of currently unemployed. But the thought of being able to scan duplex, 16 pages a minute has my mouth watering. Think of all the time I would save not having to flip open the flatbed scanner lid, place the paper on the glass plate, close the lid, click several buttons and wait for PDF to finish creating the 2D version of my document. 3 minutes later, viola.. finally I can shred the original. To persuade myself that, yes, the $ tag on the ScanSnap is worth it, I went on the web to search for reviews by actual users. I trust the blogs more than official so called product review magazines. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of entries and the quality of the entries. It's always a pleasure to find good, informative writing. For example, the following entry by a blogger:
http://www.43folders.com/2007/11/06/palimpsest-guide-mostly-paperless-life
I just need to order to the thing and get on the track of becoming even more paperless. Two boxes, that's my goal. That's the limit I want to place on keeping actual physical documents. Everything else should be PDF and OCRed so I can search using full text later on if needed.
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