New Resolutions

I have a bad habit - Jessica calls it "stacking".  I do it both at work and at home.  Basically, I find myself flooded continuously with paper.  Most of it is errant information and junk intermixed with occasional important things.  But I never have time to make a decision about what to do with it (unless it seems really important), so instead I stack it in a big pile (at work on my desk, at home in my closet).  It probably does not help that I have packrattish tendencies and am always afraid that I may throw away something critical that I will desperately need later.

Eventually the stack reaches colossal proportions.  At this point I go nuts and suddenly have a mission to do something with all of the paper.  I just did this and found that about 95% of the paper is junk that can be thrown away.

So here is my new years resolution: become better at deciding what is junk in the short term, and trash it immediately.  In order to curb my information storing obsession, I scan anything that might be important and then trash the paper version (unless it is something like a birth certificate or vehicle title).

About a month ago I got the Fugitsu Scansnap s300m, and that is a great little scanner.  I have it set up at work so that it scans directly to ReadIris for OCRing.  I save all of my .pdfs in a regular directory-based filing system and give them long, descriptive titles; since they are searchable I'm sure to always find what I need later.