Scanning my Life Away

ScanSnap S510M

Last week, picked up an awesome document scanner. One touch button scans document, saves as PDF, and runs OCR. I'm cleaning my brain. There is a windows version too, I think, but cannot vouch for it (Windows that is). Discovered via 43 Folders

More photos/screenshots below, and a brief description of my workflow. My job and many of my hobbies are closely tied to written text: research is a constant part of my day. My partners and I both take lots and lots of scribbled notes, these are often hard to process (in a GTD sense), much less organize. We have so many stacks of magazines, trade journals, newspapers, and scraps of paper that we are nearly drowning in it all.

ScanSnap application

choice of what to do with scanned document; send to OCR, save to disk, email attachment, print, etc. There is a limit of ten additional applications, but other than email, or maybe Photoshop, what else would I need? Unless I'm doing a massive amount of scanning at once, I instantly send the file to the OCR application (ABBYY Scan2PDF).

scanner waiting for OCR

OCR takes longer than scanning, so I've found that the most efficient method is to scan a bunch of documents, then send them in a batch to the OCR application and let it chug away in the background. My memory being what it is (like a spaghetti strainer), I toggle back and forth adding an asterisk to the title of the file so I don't send the same documents to the OCR application twice. By the time the OCR is done working on 10 documents, I've selected and scanned another 10 (and done other things at the same time).

Scanned Folder Workflow

As I run documents through the scanner, I save them in a folder called, without irony, "No OCR." Once the OCR is complete, and I have a moment to open the file to see what it is, I move the document to one of these folders. There will probably be more folders in the future, as I encounter a need. I've already filled up two and a half 13 gallon garbage cans for the recycling bin.