And the big one is—order. Neatness. We are prioritizing neatness.
This means…the long-postponed scanning of all the stacks of paper which have broken down our less stout filing cabinets. We spent over an hour trying to get the OCR software embedded in the Epson printer to do what we needed…and then a stroke of genius said: if we render it to PDF—can’t Adobe read it?
Oh, yes. It is blinding fast, you bet your sweet bippie Epson talks nicely to the 800 lb gorilla, Adobe, and we end up not only with pdf’ed docs, we end up with docs we can both search and edit. The Epson Workforce 840 is pretty good at physically shifting paper through its feeder, making a good legible scan/copy, and spitting it out again. And now we don’t have to spend ink, we don’t have to fight its internal OCR and fight it through MS docx format and all that. It just scans and stores in searchable pdf. Color us happy. Once we finally got the procedure down pat, we can rip through batches of paper, sort them, scan them in groups which the nice Epson autofeeds, and we are able to find things.
This will enable us to find things without a filing cabinet, and we can dismiss the contents of the filing cabinet to the wastecan, or to deeper storage in archive boxes, and that will let us file other things, many of those being scannable also.
We are beginning to put this office into the 21st century. We are going to be shedding books we will never read or never read again, storing things we want to find on shelves, and organizing the craft area. An hour of work and a lot of swearing produced about a 3″ stack of scanned and done-with documents, but that’s including the swearing. Now I’ve got a system, and I can double that in the same time.
Color us happy. We are going to get this place looking like a house, not a heap of office paper.
My heart skipped a beat when I read ‘shredding books’. I’m glad I looked again.
Double the swearing should be interesting. Don’t be letting people be starting fires and feeding you!
Yes, I read it as “shRedding” books too. Funny what the eye does, even when the emotions don’t agree with it.
I looked into OCR when I was doing my PhD thesis in the early 90’s to get the printed abstracts of late 17th/early 18th century Campbell legal documents I was analysing from books into electronic form for, well, analysing. The software was too primitive then to reliably read an early 20th century font. I typed two full books worth by hand, but it also got me very familiar with each of the documents even before going on to formal analysis.
As part of my efforts to downsize/cull/organize, I’ve been selling “never read again” books on Amazon. I think I’m going to have to start a policy that if the book doesn’t sell within a set amount of time (6 months?), it gets yanked off Amazon and donated to Friends of the Library. For those whose interest is piqued, I might point out that you can print postage through Amazon, and, since the customer pays postage, your packing/mailing supplies and Amazon’s cut are your only “overhead” items.
I have an Epsom all-in-one printer (XP400). I’ll have to investigate its scanning to PDF format capabilities as you can highlight-copy and paste text from a PDF file to Word, and vice versa, which may come in handy.
I was going to take mine to the local library to be book-sold. (Book-saled? Book-selt?) Most of them are softbound and not worth that much. The alternative is sending them to my favorite library for their book sale, which would be trips to the USPS.
I did both PaperbackSwap and Amazon when I culled my books for this last move. Amazon was almost not worth the time; bigger fish charge 1 cent + shipping, plus Amazon holds on to your money *forever*. I liked PaperbackSwap much better, but I got an initial rush of mail-outs and then other books have languished for over a year. Plus – what do you get? Credit for books! (I’ve managed to fill out some series that way, though.)
As you well know, but I will reiterate, hardcopy is robust, electronic data is extremely fragile. We can read books written before the 14th Century, to pick a random number, but who can read something saved to a 5 1/4″ floppy today? Remember QIC-2120 tape cartridges? Got some, haven’t tried to read them in years; only my 486/DOS machine could. “Double backups” on different media types, multiple copies, is called for. Migration must be planned for. 😉
We’re saving certain things, like legal documents, in both searchable electronic form, and in hardcopy. Certain ’emphemeral’ documents that are permitted by law to be sunsetted will be sunsetted and shredded. Certain things like family letters, documents, even pictures, will be rendered to e-file and disposed of. We have far too many to keep. Books will be disposed of: our library is vast, unordered, untidy, and full of things that are outmoded research books or books we wanted at the time, that we don’t treasure, and a raft of, yes, comics, mostly Marvel, from several decades ago, which we will be selling on ebay by the bagful. We have cloud backup, cd backup, and, re the family stuff, dispersal to other family members in e-form: what they then do with them is up to them: we ain’t a lending library! 😉 We’re picking formats that are highly translatable and that, if they go down, a whole bunch of business are SOL. We also don’t give too much of a damn about many of the records…I sent all my manuscripts, back when we produced written manuscripts, to the Jack Williamson Collection at Eastern NM University, in Portales NM, if any of you are ever swinging past Portales on your way to, say, baseball spring training in Peoria. We have a small 1950’s style house, our office is so small we can sit in one chair and reach most cabinets, and our bedrooms aren’t much bigger. We have a nice basement, but we already have as much stored as we can, and alas, we just can’t manage any more shelves of junque. All my old Latin and History lessons are going. All my teaching era mementos are going. I left records enough that I hope have happy lives and as many kids as they want. At a certain point, the practicality of needing shelves for the life we’re actually living beats a box of 1960’s newspapers or memorabilia clippings, sad as it is for a history buff to say so. We are tossing outdated cans of tomato sauce and tossing old clothes and getting enough closet space so we are closet-keeping only what we wear, not what was cool in the 60’s that we hope will come round again. Love beads go. 😉 So do battered old muffin tins and light bulbs that don’t fit any lamp we own, and boxes of things we can’t identify. And then we start on the garage. Our sad parting is the gain of the thrift shop down the street.
One has extreme confidence in your good sense and abilities.
Well said,
Paul!Hilfy!ker Pyanfar! Ker CJ!Ker CJ: Six (gnine?) month warning: you gneed one of these for gnext Winter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzz6lUsF19g
(Happy Gnew Year, everyone!)
You inspire me! But not yet 🙂 I have joined a group whose members each pick one to three things which they want to become habit, try to do them every single day, and check in with each other. Theory is, what you do daily for thirty days becomes habit. I think it works! So January’s task is to walk every day. And after that we’ll consider the room laughingly called the office.
Anent the discussion recently on catfood – has anyone else tried the Aldi brand, Fine Feline? At 2.7%, it is lower in ash than any of the big-name supermarket brands. My cats dive into it, gratifyingly like a catfood ad. And, at least here in north Texas, a 5.5 oz. can is only 39¢!
Getting rid of stuff is SO liberating. I have too much stuff but unfortunately not much is paper.
Most if it is mechanical stuff. Cars, motorcycles, bicycles and bicycle stuff-I was a custom frame builder, cameras, you get the idea. Thankfully I can’t have locomotives or tanks in my apartment.
The library-currently filling 6 Ikea Billy bookcases to overflowing-is going to undergo the same pruning you’re doing, getting rid of dead stuff like popular fiction I’ve read.
And the mechanical is going to be reduced from 2 one car garages to one garage. That will be great. I am unable to cycle anymore so all the bicycles excepting the ones I made for myself-they will be hung on the walls like art because they are beautiful-will be passed on and the BMW motorcycle will find a new home.
Like to see what I made? http://www.paulstubblebine.com/philbrown
Hung on the wall is a great idea.
While I an not a lawyer – your own lawyer can give you any gory details – but when I was working for the government I understood that a PDF document was acceptable for certain legal purposes.
It is good to reduce the volume of stuff.
For tax purposes, save everything for at least 3 years and anything effecting a capital asset forever.
Have a safe new years.