Digital Filing Super Powers with ScanSnap and Evernote
The digital age has promised us so much in the way of improving our lives and giving us back the free time that we supposedly lost to the inefficiencies of the past. A paperless world may seem overly utopian for our day where paper is still all around us in the form of newspapers, bills, school papers, cash, loan documents, magazines, and books. And perhaps it is a bit foolish to say that we should move to a completely paperless society at this time. However, there are many advances that technology has afforded us to help mitigate the less desirable paper clutter we have in our lives such as tax documents, receipts, papers and other documentation that may contain important information we want to archive.
Digital documents don’t immediately make your life less cluttered — they simply clear up your physical desk. A digital document affords you the ability to relocate, tag, backup, duplicate, mobilize, and reprint with only a few clicks; provided you’ve got a digital filing system prepared for such an arduous task that empowers you via an intuitive interface on any of your digital devices! Like the perfect pairing of a delicately-aged Pinot Noir with savory bruschetta, a ScanSnap scanner and Evernote, have redefined what it means to digitize your life. Romance aside, Evernote has changed how I organize much of my digital life — however, it wasn’t immediately apparent.
When I exude my passion for Evernote, a common question people ask me is “What are you supposed to put in it?”. To which I simply reply, “Everything.” I say this tongue-in-cheek to get my point across. Realistically what I mean by this is that you should start considering any item a potential candidate for storing in Evernote. Like any software, it is tuned for certain kinds of digital items such as documents, some photos, and web pages. The goal is to keep Evernote at the forefront of your mind so that you can build it into your daily lifestyle. If you don’t, you will likely find it less useful as the whole idea is to have a tool that enables you to quickly find any digital document. Even as I draft up this blog post, I do it from the comfort of Evernote.
My first investment towards a paperless life was the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510m auto feed document scanner. Its steep price was daunting as scanners, these days, are bundled with sub $100 “all-in-one” printers. The abnormally high number of positive reviews are what convinced me to make the purchase. Since that day in March 2009, I’ve never looked back and have only sold more people on this well-built machine. As stated earlier, simply converting physical documents to digital documents doesn’t immediately make your life less-cluttered or more organized. It simply puts the document into a format that makes the process easier. At this point, you need to figure out where to store the documents after they are scanned in. I thought a natural place would be my computer’s hard drive.
Over the years I came up with a couple of folder organization strategies but ended up with having one main folder called Cabinet in which I stored all the files with prefixed dates in the filenames in the format YYYY-MM-DD which represented the date that the document was relevant for (particularly good for the purchase date on a receipt, or the date of a bill). This lasted me for quite some time. I eventually moved this folder to Dropbox, where I was able to retrieve these files on my mobile devices. However, something was missing. I was indeed able to find most files I wanted, but something still felt wrong. I didn’t like that I didn’t have a way to categorize these documents aside from their date and name. I wanted to somehow tag these files to categorize them in different ways but not be constrained to the rigid computer file/folder system. This would allow me to browse or stumble upon documents that may be interesting to me rather than simply relying on searching for what I know is already there.
In the past, I had considered and even tried sending my documents to Evernote. Unfortunately, I was dismayed by how fast I filled up the monthly storage allotted for the free Evernote plan. I stuck with Dropbox for many years but still used Evernote for a variety of other things such as notes that I created or webpages that I wanted to archive for reference.
I casually follow the insightful writings and podcasts of Michael Hyatt — his passion for productivity inspires me. Recently I read an article he wrote about how he used Evernote notebooks as the primary categories of his notes but switched to using tags instead and now keeps only two notebooks: Inbox and Cabinet. Basically the reasoning is because tags are hierarchical and documents can contain many tags. Notebooks have a restriction where a document can only live in a single notebook.
I decided to adopt this organization style for my Evernote notes and converted all my notes over to the new format — thankfully Evernote makes this easy with tools to do bulk-changes. Armed with this new way of organizing in Evernote, I decided to try importing my scanned documents once again. This time, I upgraded to Premium which provides me 4GBs of bandwidth per month! If you were to fully use that space each month, you could store up to 48GBs in one year. That’s really reasonable especially when you consider the fact that there is no limit to long-term storage in your Evernote account. Do you get that? You have unlimited storage.
I changed my ScanSnap settings to scan directly into Evernote where I can now easily tag and label my documents for easy filing and searching. Image documents and PDFs are automatically indexed by Evernote’s servers using OCR technology to allow them to be searchable. I’m truly loving this new way of storing my documents and in a future post, I will reveal more details about how I categorize them.
Now I’ve got a tagging, searching, and organization system for all my digital documents that has a consistent experience on my desktop, browser, iPhone, and iPad. I trust that I can find anything I put into Evernote from any of my devices — it has yet to fail me. Its even allowed me to find things I forgot I had.
I hope you are encouraged to check out the incredible ScanSnap scanner and the well-designed Evernote filing system. Look forward for future posts on tips and tricks I may share about how I use Evernote.
