We all know how oppressive physical clutter can be... too many things hanging around cramp our space and our ability to function. Filing cabinets overflowing with paper in which we can find nothing... The other day, I was reading an article on http://www.unclutterer.com/ about scanning paper files. This couple scanned all their documents and then went ahead and scanned all sorts of magazine articles that they wanted to keep as well...
Which leaves me begging the question... is virtual clutter any better than physical clutter? Is it more unobtrusive? Is it OK that we can fit tonnes of paper onto a flashdrive the size of our thumb? Does that make it any more manageable? Is "out of sight, out of mind" the thing to hold onto here?
Obviously, having thousands of documents on a flashdrive doesn't help you if they are not organized. But if we can't even organize our physical paper... how good are we going to be at organizing our virtual paper? And if we can't do that... then all those virtual documents are basically useless to us. If we can't find them... then what's the point of having them...
I do like the idea of being able to scan things and then let them go... although part of me shudders at the thought of throwing away papers and documents... "what if I need the original some day"!!! Then again... we can't hold onto everything... can we?
The other thing here is getting the right scanner... one that has a hopper you can feed stacks of paper into... They used the Fujitsu ScanSnap which can do that... I don't think I could do it using my little HP All-In-One, which can only handle one paper at a time... You need something that has a scanning capability, almost like a photocopier... Which makes me think... Staples has big huge copiers that scan very quickly and store things in memory before printing/copying it on paper... What about just inserting a thumbdrive and getting your copies on that... Oohhh... possibilities!!
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