Help Me I'm Drowning In Paper

What does your office look like? Can you find your mouse in the morning without moving anything? Can you find last month's bank statement in under one week. Are you a neat-nick stuck in a litterbug's life. How bout going paperless.

Yes I said paperless. No paper. But how, how Geek can this happen?

Well you could hire a professional like John Cushman of Solany Document Management in Denver. If you have an office with a lot of files and need real, professional help, John can help. I had THOUSANDS of plans and documents scanned, and this company was great. John, the founder, has recently become a Mac Addict as well, showing his true intelligent nature.

Lets say you are just a regular human. To go paperless you need a way to get information into your computer. A scanner is good. Most of us now have some sort of scanner, usually associated with a printer or fax machine. Good you can get something in the computer. Not great though. You need to scan it in, dozens of documents a month. Using a slow, clumsy scanner. What's the chance you really will keep it up? About the same as the chance of you winning the Lottery this week. Just about none.

I have two other suggestions. the first is pretty easy, and costs you nothing. It is good in most ways. Go to paperless billing. Almost all credit card companies and utilities let you do it, no paper bills, just an email that you DO NOT PRINT because then you wouldn't be paperless would you?? Must the Geek tell you everything? Just save the pdf file. While your at it, pay the bill on line, save paper and the stamp.

This will not take you paperless, because there are things you can not get paperlessly. Some one sends you a letter telling you that you won the Lottery. If you want that paperlessly you need to scan it then throw it away. Back to that scanner.

A better idea, Fujitsu Snapscan. It is not cheap, but does come with Adobe. It is small, light wait and very fast. You can take a handful of paper, put it the slot and scan it in moments. Moments, its so fast you will not believe your eyes. Then you can easily either file it, or convert it to a text searchable document using your new Adobe program.

The Snapscan folds to a very small footprint so it doesn't eat up your desk space. It is about $425, and a vast improvement over your clunky scanner. Word of warning, there is a Mac version and a PC version, be sure you get the right one. This lets you get bills, letters, Warrants, receipts and whatever else you want to keep in the computer and safe.

Now a warning: if you don't have a file system, and you don't get rid of the paper and you don't back up, you haven't completed the process. I will cover that part of the process soon, dear geekettes.