Managing The Paper Clutter

I don’t know about most people, but I have stacks of paper all over the place. Articles out of magazines I thought were interesting, old manuscript paper, etc, etc. For receipts, I have been in the practice of scanning those for a while, for taxes and stuff. But the paper stacks, I try to scan them, but it just takes too long (there are a LOT of stacks, and they are fairly thick). My Epson CX6600 is good, but scanning takes a lot of time. And then, there is the “what now” problem.

A sheet feed scanner sounds like a great solution. Fujitsu makes this ScanSnap product that can, supposedly, do up to 18 double sided pages a minute. It’s a good chunk of change though, nearly $500 (they have some rebates going at the moment). It does come bundled with Adobe Acrobat 8 though. Plus, it has some OCR stuff which will allow the scanned things to be searchable.

I had, years ago, a Visoneer Paperport that was great, but it died.

Getting rid of paper is a definite goal, but is it really worth the $$? Having all the stuff accessible, and searchable sounds like a great thing. I kind of think of it maybe as investing in a Hard Drive and ripping all my CDs into digital format. It was a pain, it cost money, but in the end, it was worth it. Perhaps I should look into this sheet feed scanner thing.

On a side note, in my Studio, I have a CD changer (300 disc) and iTunes. I used to use the CD player all the time, and rarely use iTunes. Now, it is the other way around. I use iTunes all the time, and hardly ever use the CD player now. It is great to be able to drag a tune out of iTunes into Transcribe and slow it down.