The inbox: paperless or bust
Posted on November 16, 2007
Filed Under All, Technology, New Life |
I just have to figure out how to move my inbox to a paperless workflow. The stuff that piles up on my desk, like so many leaves, plastic bags and old newspapers that gather under freeway overpasses is just a mess. I need to scan all of this stuff in, as soon as it arrives, and deal with it digitally.
The drawback is that my fast ScanSnap scanner only has a driver for my G4 mini (which is a server): I need to find a way to grab those scans, change their cryptic date-encoded names to something meaningful, and go from there. Maybe I need a Mac OS X Smart Folder or an Automator action to make this work. Anybody have tips and tricks…? Anyway, working on it…
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5 Responses to “The inbox: paperless or bust”
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Allow me to be, in a friendly way, skeptical of automating anyone’s inbox. By the time the stuff is scanned, it could have sorted manually and everyone goes to lunch early.
Why do bills have to scanned for example? I have two plastic envelopes, one yellow for mid-month bills and the blue one for EOM bills. At inbox processing the envelope gets slit, the amount due marked, and they are tucked into the appropriate envelope. At bill pay time the stay-behind tear off is saved in a flex folder.
Ok, enough on that, sorry if I am butting into the way you want to operate your desk, but its just an IMHO post.
My apologies, my conscience is bothering me. I’m home alone without any adult to monitor my on line behavior. If my wife were here she would fall down laughing at the thought of “Mr. Organized (ha!)” offering anyone advice on organization. The wifely question, “Where did you put that insurance form (whatever)?” has struck cold terror into my heart. The fact is my paperwork organization arrangements are a point of contention within this household so I wish now I could recall my remarks. But they are now in the aether and on the Goggle servers forever. If you’ve got a system maybe you can write the book and I’ll buy it.
Lamar- a system can use any sort of box, basket, envelopes or whatever. My issue has been - and you point this out - finding a given document in the hundreds or thousands that typicaly accrue in the space of a year or so.
If they’re paper you pretty much just have to look through everything (unless you’ve done some work to classify documents into groups): if they’ve been scanned and OCRed you can often find them with a computer search. The idea was that the quick scan and automated OCR was minimal work.
But somehow, I’m always behind in scanning, and now with some 2000 documents in my collection, searching is getting a bit Google-like - I get lots of hits for ‘VISA card’ or whatever. My electronic GTD (Get Things Done) is BTTDB (Back To The Drawing Board).
I work for a UK government department handling correspondence (over 100,000 per year, so probably overkill for your needs, but maybe some ideas can be taken). When mail comes in it gets date stamped, and logged on to the system. The logging on is done on a web based system and is like this:
1. A search is done to find if that person or organisation has any previous correspondence, and if not, a new applicant and all their known contact details is added.
2. A new case is created for that applicant for this latest piece of correspondence, which automatically gets assigned a unique reference number written on the paper case.
3. Information is added to the case in the form of any number of predefined keywords - in your case these could be things like ‘receipt’ ‘electrical’ ‘tax’ ‘ipod’ ‘photography’ or whatever. Also a ‘notes’ box can be added to and in our case is usually something like ‘includes book - not scanned (ISBN number xxxx)’
4. Dates are added - date sent, date received, and date logged.
5. The scanned image is uploaded to that case which now includes a date stamp and reference number on the scanned image (doubling up information).
6. If a reply is required it is assigned to who will write it, and they will be automatically emailed with the case reference number so they can open it and start work.
7. If no further action is needed it will be closed as completed.
We don’t do any OCR on the scans because no system in the world will recognise the handwriting of 60m different people. Searches can be done for any or all of the information (for example dated ‘december 2006′, keywords ‘ipod’ and ‘receipt’ so you could find the receipt, or ‘any open cases assigned to a person’ so you could get an instant to do list).
Unfortunately the system we use isn’t commercially available (UK gov only), and so I cant point you to any marketing blurb on it, but hopefully you can take some ideas from my brief description.
J- THank you… lots of good ideas there, a few of which may be good for a home-based system.
I’ve started moving files that I know I’ll need at income tax time into monthly folders, so it’ll be a bit easier to dig them out when I’m doing taxes…
The OCR has helped me find things like ‘ipod receipt’ - which, in one case, spared me from having to pay for an iPod repair. I appreciate the hand-writing problem… but most of what I get OCRs just fine.