Paperless: Minimalism

I think it was more than twenty years ago that the idea of going paperless first surfaced in my head.  The thought that we could get everything scanned into the computer and that I could get rid of the stacks of receipts (saved just in case we ever needed to service something) or bills (so we could prove how long we lived somewhere) or school notes (because … well I must be a hoarder).

The concept was great, but in practice, getting out the scanner, placing a page down, letting the scanner slowly run back and forth, materialize the image, and then to save it (or add it to a multi-page document) took a very long time.  I could spend a few hours and only knock the dust off the stack of things to scan.  I was never going to succeed.

Last Wednesday that all changed.  My new ScanSnap IX500 arrived.  The scanner is a beast.  It scans both sides of the page in a single pass, kicks out 25 pages a minute, and dumps the output into PDFs for JPGs with ease.  We’ve ripped through what would have been several months worth of work using the old flatbed scanner in only a few hours.

I compared reviews with some other ones and based on the comments, I decided to go with this scanner.  The software is not perfect, especially with regard to picking filenames and the scanner is not cheap, but damn, it is worth every penny and I can live with the minor issues.