My Paperless Life
After borrowing a colleague’s document scanner at work, I decided to attempt to go paperless in my new job at the University of Oregon. So, here’s my basic set-up:
- A Pentax DS Mobile 600 document scanner
- DevonThink Pro by Devon Technologies
- Time Machine for backup to an external 500 Gig HD
- BackBlaze online backup for $5.00 per month
With this configuration, I am able to easily scan documents into my MacBook Pro, run them through Adobe Acrobat’s OCR program and then save them either into specific folders on my computer or simply dump them into the database program DevonThink Pro. Once this is done, my Time Machine and BackBlaze backups make sure that the files are backed up.
So far, the system works well for me and my workflow. Now if paper comes in, it gets scanned and then the paper either gets destroyed or it gets filed away for later use if I absolutely need to have the paper copy. My desk is very clean and I at least give the appearance of being organized. One of the consequences of running a system like this is that I am, in a way, forced to be more organized with all of the items on my computer. I use tags in DevonThink Pro to tag documents for easy retrieval. I have a clean desktop and try and go through my “Downloads” folder weekly.
Paperless–I like working this way so far.
