One way I stayed sane while working as a physician, doing our practice’s IT work, and being a single parent was my paper management system I called scan, shred, heap. Basically any paper that didn’t need an original signature got scanned, indexed using optical character recognition, then immediately shredded. Scanned files generally didn’t get filed, but stored in a heap that was indexed for rapid searching on document content. It worked really well, in that there are huge amounts of paperwork associated with a medical practice, and with running a business, and with parenting. Not having to spend a lot of time filing, not having to dedicate the space to storing paper, and being able to instantly recall documents was amazing. Only a tiny fraction of the documents ever need to be retrieved, so having to spend a little more time searching was far better than investing time into filing.
It is true that I would sometimes let documents pile up for a few weeks, and then have to spend a handful of dedicated hours scanning and shredding, but it didn’t happen to often and I didn’t get that far behind. The scanning/shredding process was also pretty mindless, like doing backups.
When I moved to the island place, I had to wait for our container of household treasures to reach the island, during which time I let the papers pile up. Then I was assured by all and sundry that there would be times when the pouring rain would keep me indoors for days or weeks at a time, so I set about taking care of the many outdoor projects and continued to let the papers pile up, waiting for a rainy day.
Kagi’s AI tells me that this has been the driest year here since 2011. We have had very, very few rainy days in the past year. In fact, we had more rain in the two days before I moved here (19”) than we’ve had in the year since (18”). When I did take a little time to try to scan and shred, I discovered that the sheet-fed scanner basically doesn’t work due to the humidity. (Yes, we haven’t had a lot of rain, but the humidity is still only rarely below 90%). The printer also fails, and the shredder didn’t work all that well either.
I bought a new shredder, and it worked great for a dozen or so pages but now, even if I clean it thoroughly, it will only shred about four sheets of paper (one at a time) until it jams up, slows, overheats, and requires 40 minutes to cool down until I can start again. Don’t even try to feed it more than one sheet at a time. I thought lubricating it might help, but my order of lubricating sheets got caught by the AWS outage and won’t be here until mid-November. So I now have about a year’s worth of accumulated paper (it’s a lot even though I’m retired) and scanning it and shredding it have become a tedious matter of having frequent paper jams, cleaning stuff out, and trying again. Progress has been agonizingly slow.
I realized that I had become so accustomed to quick, reliable scanning that I was preserving everything. I’m going to have to come up with a viable scanning solution (I have a flatbed scanner in my all-in-one printer, and I have several phones that can act as scanners) and some way to shred stuff (I could take it into town, but the chickens do like nesting in the chad). I’m also going to have to much more aggressively triage what I chose to preserve.
Getting the piles of paper off my desk is still a work-in-progress.
—2p