- Scanner placement - It seems like a simple thing, I can set the scanner right behind me and just roll back and drop the papers in. The issue is you end up having to do this mutliple times during the entire scanning process. So I will be moving the scanner onto the desk, right in front of me, making it easier to drop the papers onto the feeder and scan.
- What to scan - Initially I thought I'd like to scan several different kinds of documents. Now I'm thinking that I'm going to narrow the scope down a bit more. I really only care about financial records, contracts, and government documents. I may keep a few hand-written notes around, for good measure, and probably some of my son's drawings that he gives me, but pretty much everything else needs to go away. I don't need temporary documents like letters, or print outs of PDF's and word documents, so into the shredder those will go.
- Document sorting - See this is why we got into this mess in the first place. Of all the documents I have, some are sorted, but most are not. This is by far the MOST time consuming part of the whole project. I spent a good 90 minutes sorting bank statements going back to 2006.
- Scanner - The scanner I have is doing an OK job for now, but a duplex scanner with the simple "Scan" button would make things run MUCH more efficiently.
- Shred Box and Recycle Box - As I stated, I'm not some evironmental, tree-hugging, whacko. That's not my purpose for doing this project. But, since I am going through the exercise, I might as well go ahead and sort things accordingly. So I created a "Shred Box" and a "Recycle Box". The Shred Box contains documents that I want to shred, obviously. The Recycle Box is really just a paper trash box, things that I know I'm going to throw out, but don't need to go all the trouble of shredding.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Real World Archiving - Day One Results
OK. So I spent a good couple of hours working on Saturday and I ran into a few issues.
