Going paperless, yet another important lesson learned

Don’t eliminate documents you might need during a time that you will not be able to access your machine or the internet. For example, the manual to help you diagnose why your generator isn’t starting during the power outage. All those documents stored on the computer that you can’t turn on are pretty useless during that time. *Sigh* Another lesson learned.

War on paper–Victory!

That’s right, I’m calling it done! It was a hard battle. My paper shredder will never be the same, and it will be some time before we successfully clean up all of the little bits of shredded paper that the cats have migrated through the house, but aside from that it’s all gone.

I was set to call it about two weeks ago except that we found a couple of boxes lingering in the attic. One of them we kept, as it was full of my writings and I’m not about to give those up. The other box had finances from 98-2003 and a bunch of sentimental and academic records. Turns out I had my report card from kindergarten. Apparently I did quite well. What’s more, you’re going to have to take my word on that now as the proof has gone out with the recycling. All of the finance stuff was over 7 years old so I was able to shred all of that. In all, it took all of three hours to empty that box, and most of that was waiting to keep the shredder from overheating.

The filing cabinet is gone, and the table that held all of the loose papers has been taken down. Suddenly my office is huge! I’ve recovered all of the manuals that Chrome (grumble) corrupted. And it’s all backed up.

The war on clutter is not over, but we’ve made great strides. Nothing motivates de-cluttering like prepping a house for sale. We’ve begun packing things up and have rented out a small storage space. Part of that packing up means going through everything and seeing what we can get rid of. Thank goodness there’s no cap on freecycle and craigslist postings.  But that fight will not end even after we move. As jobs change, as kids grow, as things break and gift giving times pass, clutter will try to accumulate. The good fight must go on, and so shall we.

War on clutter - Grumble

When downloading masses of PDF's and throwing out the manuals they're meant to replace, first check to be sure your browser has not corrupted the PDF.

All of the PDF's.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=126a994c86c546eb&hl=en

Chrome is on my 'do not like' list.

Of 73 Manuals downloaded, 68 must now be found and downloaded again only this time without the original hard copy to know if what I'm getting is right. All of the ones I used Chrome to save the PDF.

Grumble.

War on clutter - Casualties

All wars have casualties. With a few tears I bid a fond farewell to my pencil collection. Back in the day, whenever we'd take a trip I'd buy a pencil from the gift shop (it was a heck of a lot cheaper than a t-shirt). I'd also save pencils with cool designs, fun toppers, and whatnot, but for many years now it has simply gathered dust on a shelf.
And so, I donate them now to a charity that sends school supplies to Africa. May they find as much utility in the collection as I found joy.

War on Clutter, part 3

Progress is never as swift as one may like, but progress is still progress. Our reclining chair is now gone, and just in the nick of time, as it gave us a place to setup our Christmas tree. That act alone was enough to galvanize me back into attacking the stacks of paper that had begun to gather dust next to my desk.

Manuals continue to fall prey to the recycle bin as I find their digital counterparts online. I’ve also become more lax about what I’m willing to throw out, and have to laugh at myself for holding on to some things so fervently before. Why do I need assembly instructions for the entertainment center? I’m not going to put it together again.

Going paperless has also had a positive impact on the amount of mail we receive. It’s mostly junk now, and I’ve not figured out how to make Chase Bank stop sending me credit card offers, but the sheer mass of paper flowing into the house has decreased dramatically.

One odd note. It turns out that when you call the yellow pages distributor to opt out of receiving future copies, the try to sell you books. They also ask for your email address to verify that you wish to continue to opt out in the future. Sketchy?

The spoils of war

In a word: Booyah!

Our recycling gets picked up every 2 weeks and normally our paper fills one of the plastic bins, while our glass plastic and cans fill the other. This time, everything you see here is paper. Shredded financial statements, old manuals that have been replaced with digital copies, and misc errata that filled the filing cabinet for years for reasons unknown.

This isn’t everything from the filing cabinet. But it is a serious dent. And it feels good!

This week we also said goodbye to 3 lamps and an ironing board. They’ve gone to a place that will appreciate them more. We also trying to get rid of the chair shown in the above picture. Does anyone want it?

Going paperless, manual edition

About 4 years ago I went online to find the manual to our ice cream maker as it had a recipe we wanted to try, and at the time we could not find it (that was before we used the filing cabinet and even were really organized). It took about 3 hours of searching, traversing various sites, before I found what I was looking for. The manufacturer’s site was of no help. Their site looked like it was made from geocities. With that in mind, I was hesitant to begin the phase of going paperless where you download or scan your manuals to get rid of the paper copies.

I’m happy to say things have improved dramatically in the last 4 years. The ice cream maker’s site? I found the manual in about 45 seconds. For most manufacturers even, you can now track down a manual for something you own to download and throw out the paper copy. It’s fantastic!

But there are still limits. Store brands are woefully under-represented. It is still possible to find such manuals online, but you have to go to sites that advertise themselves as manual repositories, and usually just contain links back to the manufacturer or store front who doesn’t have that manual available for download. Some of the sites do have manuals, but the download link is obscured around several dozen google ads they try to make you click by accident. I’m pretty sure that’s their business model.  They can be found, but it does take some hunting. Craftsmen and Husky proved particularly challenging.

Another limiter is that a lot of the manufacturers only provide manuals for products they are actively selling. A shop vac I bought from Ryobi is no longer offered and the manual cannot be found anywhere.

There are also time limits, even for larger companies that you wouldn’t think would be a problem. A Frigidaire refrigerator we bought in 2005 had an easy to find manual, but the chest freezer from 2001 could not be located. If you want to go paperless, start downloading manuals now! Just because you can find them now does not mean they’ll still be around when you need them.

It has been a good two weeks of getting rid of paper. I hope to snap a photo of everything that we’re putting out for recycling this Thursday.

The War on clutter, Part 2

A fantastic weekend! So much gone. Though so much remains. It’s astonishing how much of a mess is created by cleaning out all of the junk in your life. But to get rid of it, it must first be exposed.

We got rid of our filing cabinet.

The paperless effort has made progress over the course of the last year, but it can be hard to find the time and motivation to pull a file folder out of the drawer and proceed to scan and shred. So, last weekend, I realized that to get rid of the paper, we must first get rid of the container that holds it. Just like getting rid of the coffee table eliminated the junk that accumulated upon it.

Where there was a filing cabinet now sits several small stacks of file folders. But again, as with the coffee table, the room is now much bigger. Even with the floor littered with file folders, the room has grown in size. It’s not about increasing how much space you have, but rediscovering how much space is already there.

We also got rid of our old home stereo system, and will hopefully today be rid of a charcoal grill that came with the house and the second litter box we no longer use. Last week about 7 CD’s sold, and we went through our books to see what to donate, so the shelves are now more spacious.

The goal has become to move out of our house with less than we moved in with. This will be a challenge given that we’ve since had a kid, but I think it is possible. At the very least, we might be able to break even, which is still saying a lot.

So, yes, a fantastic weekend!

The War on Paper is now the War on Clutter

The war on paper is not over. The soldiers got temporarily re-deployed onto other projects to reduce home clutter in other ways, but they’re starting to trickle back and hitting the paper hard. The 2009 finances are done, as well as half of the car records. I’ve also started downloading pdf versions of some manuals.

We finally got rid of our 20 year old TV, and replaced it with something a little nicer. More importantly, we got rid of the old entertainment center. The thing was massive, and a magnet for odds and ends to accumulate upon. The newer one is much smaller. Less footprint = less mess. I swear, our living room doubled in sized once we got rid of that thing.

When we got the house, it ended up being a foreclosure auction, and some things of the previous owner were left behind, including a pretty sizeable collection of Blues and Jazz CD’s. We held onto them for a couple of years in case the previous owner ever came back looking for them, but have started to sell them off on Amazon. Listing on amazon is pretty easy, but it still takes a while to list over 300 CD’s, especially when you need to sample each one to make sure it works, given that they’ve been sitting in the attic for quite a while. Over half of them are gone now, which feels pretty good.

While getting rid of junk is important, Julie and I are trying  pretty hard to minimize how much we actually throw away. There are lots of recycling programs. The TV was donated

The war is not over, but neither is it lost!

The war on paper, part 7

A lot of you have asked (and by a lot of you, I mean one, which technically is infinitely more than none, the more common number of questions, so I hold a lot to be valid) about organization and backups of the scans.

Organization: Currently I organize the files the same way I organized them in the filing cabinet. Scansnap creates folders where it deposits the PDF’s, as well as running a pretty decent OCR algorithm through to make them searchable. So, if I ever needed to find record of a purchase in ‘07, I browse to the ‘07 folder and perform a word search. A couple of test runs has thus far proved fruitful.

Backups: Currently backups are performed onsite. I have a simple D-Link NAS setup in the living room with a 1TB and 500GB hard drive in it. I run GFI Home backup which works well and is free. Every 10 days it performs an incremental backup of my system on one of the two drives. I have the same setup running on my wife’s machine. Admittedly, this means that I can lose up to one week’s worth of work, but at the same time it can take a while for a corruption to manifest, and I prefer incremental backups, so I prefer a method where my backups are a few weeks out of day vs. having recent updates that are both corrupted, and then all of the data is lost.

At some point in the near future I hope to setup a backup of critical data to a cloud source. I’ve not settled on a particular solution, though I’ve looked at Mozy, Carbonite and Skydrive. I’d rather avoid the monthly maintenance fee so I’m trying to keep critical data to minimum to remain with the free offerings of the different services.

On a side note, you may notice that there is a wireless router next to the NAS. It’s actually a WiFi repeater, not a router, configured to extend my existing network to make it wireless and have the NAS in the living room without running lots of ethernet through the ceiling and walls. Admittedly, this slows down the backup process, but there are multiple reasons to set it up there. Some may ask why (or not), but that is a story for another day.

The war on paper, part 6

Another quick update. I’ve gotten back to scanning.  I was going to say that the pile on the shredder has gotten bigger, but Julie has discovered that she loves to shred paper too. These bags are filling up fast!

It should be noted that shredding is messy business. Especially when you have cats that love to play with the bits of shredded paper and them track them all over the house.

Also, I’m an idiot (no surprise there). I’ve still not signed up for receive statements electronically, so things keep coming in the mail. This must be resolved quickly!

The War on Paper, part 5

No giant revelations today. The fact is, work has consumed my life for the last two months, and I’m only just now able to be at home and not doing work. As such, progress has been slow.

But, I am proud to say that we’ve kicked off the next phase, and perhaps the most gratifying. The shredding!

This is but a small sample of what needs to be shredded. Sadly, our shredder like most consumer grade devices can only handle a few hundred pages before the motor starts to overheat. Mind you, it’ll keep going, but that’s bad for the life of the machine. If it came down to it I suppose I could retrofit it with a 24V boding double worm reduction motor that weighs more than the shredder itself, but that would  be cheating, and probably destroy the gears instead. Because of the bandwidth limit on the shredder, we’ve started shredding before we finished scanning, which is a little intimidating. I can’t say, “Okay, that parts done and solid, now on to the next part.” I’ve been waiting to say that for the last few months, but due to work instead I just look at massive piles of paper that sit there, already scanned, waiting to be shredded, simply taking up space in an ever shrinking office.

It was a little nerve-wracking at first, but quickly gave way to a game of how long I could string together pages without changing the cadence of the shredder mower before the bin got full.

The war on paper, part 4

I think it’s fair to warn I’ll be talking about this for a while. Given that there’s little about work I’m permitted to speak about, and for fear of becoming one of those parents who speak incessantly about their child as though he’s the first person to ever go through any of that (though those posts will emerge, to be sure), I’m going to stick with this topic for a bit. At least until I’ve managed to win the war, or achieve a cease fire.

For comparison sake: Here is the filing cabinet:

And here is what scans the paper:

There’s obviously more to it than that. What do you do with the paper when you’re done with it? What do you do with the things that you can’t scan? What about data loss?

I have answers to most of those questions, but not all. As they become more relevant I will update. But for now, I’ve still only gotten as far as the 2006 finances.

So, I will simply link to a video of Alex crawling with his freakingly adorable hat on.

The war on paper, part 3

I’ve scanned up through our 2006 finances. It’s interesting to watch the trends in our organization emerge, dissolve, re-emerge, etc.

In the beginning, we kept separate folders for phone bills, utility bills, etc. We also separated our financial records between my accounts and Julie’s accounts. That lasted about a year. By end end of ‘05 everything went into the same folder.

We also worked to make the paper system work. When writing a check to pay a particular bill, we’d pull the carbon copy out of the check book and staple it to the bill for easy reference in case we ever had to look it up. We would also staple deposit receipts with the paystubs to reference we when deposited income. It was an awesome system. The problem, of course, is that we never actually needed to go back to look up any of that information. We meticulously documented stuff that just didn’t matter.

I still believe that record retention is important, that’s why I’m scanning it all in. I also believe that the integrity of your organization should correspond to the frequency with which you will need to access that data. Yes, it will take a few minutes longer to find a phone bill, assuming I ever need to find it, which I probably won’t.

Word to the wise. If you foresee yourself ever going paperless, avoid staples. Or, at the very least, get a staple remover.

Other interesting things I’ve noticed:

• While I appreciate that American express uses smaller pages for their statements to reduce paper consumption, it means they have to be scanned separately from most of the other documents.
• That said, the most common document thus far to cause a paper jam is a Capital One statement. They use pages that 8.5” wide but 33% longer, and for some reason that increases their likelihood to cause a paper jam.
• I really do like this scanner. It’s not taken me so long to get through 2005 and 2006 documents because it’s a long and arduous process. It actually only took me a couple of hours.

The war on paper, part 2

I must say: At first blush, this duplexing scanner is awesome. No more loading one page at a time on a flatbed scanner, flipping to get the other side. I load in 10-20 pages at a time, hit the button, and put a basket underneath the catch the spoils. Paper jams are surprisingly far between for something that is entry level for its category. I’ve not investigated the character recognition, so I don’t know how well it indexes all of the financial statements, but as long as I can search by a month and year, I should be able to get close enough to hone in on what I’m looking for.

One lesson that’s held true is the importance of having a reasonable filing system. One that gets you close quickly, without being overly specific. We used to have different folders for different kinds of bills. One for gas, one for phones, one student loan payments. We’ve since consolidated to a folder that holds all of the finance documents for a given year. Specificity is directly related to the frequency one must access the data. Don’t have a file folder to distinguish between gas bills and electric bills if you’re going to have to look back at them once or twice a year.

But folders are still needed! I feel it is important to spell that out for my own sake, mostly because of the engineering product lifecycle management software we’re getting at work. It pushes in the opposite direction, with minimal folders and an emphasis on searching for what you need by indexing documents through their metadata (information that’s not immediately in the document, but attached to it as relevant upon putting the document inside the database). Admittedly, that’s where the future appears to be headed, with refined search technologies and greater indexing capabilities to automate document parsing and knowledge retrieval. Call me old fashioned, but I like folders.

And yes, I do see the irony in that last statement given that I’m in the process of digitizing old paper to get rid of it and better embrace the future.

We’ve thus far won many of the battles, but the war is not over. The master strategy has not fully matured. This is the not beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning!! (Thanks Churchill)

The war on paper

It began with the coffee table. For the past 3 years we have lived in a 3 bedroom house. For more than two years of that, it was just the two of us. One might think that 3 bedrooms is more than enough to house just two people. That’s what we thought when we bought it. We wanted room to grow our family. But after two years we found the house seemed to be shrinking. What was once spacious had become crowded. No matter how many shelves we setup, no matter how many plastic tubs we put into the attic, the house was getting progressively crowded. What’s worse, we were plagued with clutter. No amount effort was sufficient to eliminate the clutter from our home. Many weekends were lost in the effort to clean up and organize the home better. There simply was not enough space to house all that we had accumulated.

Credit to the source of our solution comes from my sister’s boyfriend. We visited them one evening and both of us could not help but notice how clean his apartment was. Granted, he had no child to muss things up, but our problems predated the birth of our son. His toys only added to the mountain of clutter. On the trip up we’d talked about the feasibility of finding a larger home. Neither one of us liked the idea. We like our home, we like our neighbors, and the market means we’d have to sell at a loss, which would not position us well to buy into a larger home.

But, back to the apartment. Very open, very clean. The drive home was a different conversation. That’s when I realized it: Surfaces! Kevin has a distinct lack of surfaces. Surfaces obviously afford a place to put things down, but unless you maintain vigilance, they will gather rather than forcing you to tend to them. Lacking surfaces, there was no place for clutter to really gather. He had to deal with the mail when it arrived, rather than putting in a pile to grow. He had to deal with the empty grocery bags, rather than throwing them on top of the coffee table.

It took some work, but we finally got rid of our coffee table. The impact was immediate. The living room doubled in size, and was inherently cleaner. My wife looked at me and said, “What else can we get rid of?”

We posted items on ebay, craigslist, and freecycle. We donated what would not sell or people asked for. We threw away what the  donation’s people would not take. We hemorrhaged clothes we’d never wear and books we’d never read again.  Finally we came to the latest project, which is the filing cabinet. I’ve had this cabinet since college. It’s survived 5 moves (including one down the street on top of a rolling trash can in the snow), it weighs a ton, and it’s big and an eyesore. Julie never cared for it, but we needed a place to keep all of our files. The irony, is that the solution to get rid of the filing cabinet weighs about `1 lb and is the size of  a brick. It’s a duplexing scanner. We are going paperless.