Life comes with too much paper, especially if you’re like me: a mildly obsessive but poorly organized pack-rat.
I’m afraid to throw away potentially useful pieces of paper out of fear that I’ll need them later. This often results in my personal spaces at home and at the office looking disorganized — some would say a mess. I envy people who are good at organizing, and at depositing bills, financial statements, and other important documents into file cabinets. I marvel at the spaces of well-organized colleagues whose offices look orderly.
Paper has a funny way of accumulating. I’ve long been in the habit of clipping interesting things from newspapers and magazines, though now I’ll often grab copies of stuff I like online and save it to my hard drive. But what about the stuff you can’t just grab from a Google search — the stuff that’s only on paper?
That Pink Floyd Review
For instance, I have hundreds of articles from early in my career — I started out as a newspaper reporter — that are boxed away in a basement, slowly decaying. I have a life’s worth of other analogous ephemera that for whatever reason I’d like to preserve in digital form: a review in a French newspaper of a 1988 Pink Floyd concert I attended, old recipes found in magazines that I still want to try, memorable cards and letters from family and friends, tax and legal records, financial statements. All this is scattered about with no rhyme or reason in cabinets and boxes in my home and office.
Some of it — the articles I’ve written, especially — I’d like to scan and store on my computer’s hard drive and perhaps publish on the Web. There are excellent document scanners on the market that make that task fairly easy to do, but…