We just celebrated Mother’s Day and since I have young kids I was lucky enough to get lots of school-made gifts sent home. My five year old put that her favorite thing I do for her is “let her watch a TV show after dinner.” Note she did not say, take care of her when she is sick, feed her dinner, or help her with her clothes every morning, nope TV. Sweet huh? Of all the stuff that goes into running my household that is what she loves the most. Clearly her world is pretty self-centered, as any self-respecting five year olds should be, and I am good with that. But it did get me thinking about the business of being a Mom.

It turns out that Moms are good at a lot of things (other than pressing the power button) and if they aren’t at first they improve out of pure necessity. Moms (no matter how free-spirited and relaxed) create systems and multi-task possibly better than some Fortune 500 CEOs. When I had my first baby.. well it was a mess. It took 2 hours to just get an 8lb baby out of the door. Then, like most Moms, I figured out systems and put them in place. Now I get three kids, five and under, dressed, fed and ready to leave every morning in less than an hour. My point being, that putting systems in place is something we know how to do. Unfortunately, I don’t think a lot of Moms enhance their systems by leveraging technology. Your house is a small business and we know that any business now would be crazy not to take advantage of the technology available.

There are many different technology tools out there, but I want to focus on going paperless with Evernote. I encourage you to put new systems in place, for example spend 10 minutes every Saturday scanning in anything in your scan pile.

Here are just a few examples of ways to use Evernote:

Important Documents
Like any business the flow of “business” related paperwork is pretty high. Bank statements, insurance, warranties, mortgages, taxes, birth certificates important receipts and kids artwork are just the first things that come to mind.

Medical Information
Running a home, means you need to have medical information on hand. Keep shot records, allergy lists and medication information for those unexpected medical moments.

Travel Planning
A family vacation is no simple task. You must find a place to stay, make travel plans and keep track of the paperwork. Not to mention the work to get everyone out the door. I keep all my lists with everything we need to get packed in Evernote. It is so easy to share notes I can send them over to my husband too.

Home/Property Management
Managing your home or multiple homes is a lot of work. However, there are massive amounts of time to be saved by tracking all your home information through a paperless system. You can put warranty info, appliance info, leases, paperwork, pictures, and repair contacts all in Evernote. This allows you to easily and promptly deal with any home situation that occurs.

Kids’ Activities Schedules
Kids should come with their own secretaries. Keeping up with their back and forth is exhausting. School schedules, sports information are all saved in Evernote. That way no matter where I am I can reference these events that we need to work around.

Businesses measure success by profit. I think in our business time is the profit. More time gained is less time stressed and freedom to be with our families.

(Photo by cogdogblog)

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The latest version of the Mac client has an awesome new feature: the ability to save attachments to a folder. You can do this for an individual note, a group of notes, an entire notebook, or your entire Evernote database.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

This video on saving attachments in Evernote is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

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The service does a lot of Dropbox-y things, but I thought I would focus on one of the advertised features that is relevant to going paperless: the ability to OCR uploaded documents.

Note that this is not a comprehensive runthrough of Google Drive and I am not going to talk about privacy issues. As with any cloud service, you should be familiar with the company’s policies and decide for yourself whether you are comfortable with them having your data on their servers.

Setting Up Sync

Once you have enabled your Google Drive account, you then have the opportunity to download the Mac or Windows client. While installing, it will create a “Special Folder” on your computer.

If you are an existing Google Docs user, you may want to click the Advanced setup button on the next screen. There you can configure which of your existing Google Docs documents will get synchronized to your computer automatically.

Accessing Your Drive

Once the Google Drive application is installed and running, you will then have a special Google Drive folder. Some files may have been automatically copied to it.

If you have “non-Google Docs” files such as PDFs saved in Google Docs already, they will have downloaded. Depending on your settings, it may have also downloaded some .gdoc files as well. When you double-click them, you’ll be taken to your Google Drive on the web.

Uploading Documents To Google Drive

Uploading documents to Google Drive is as easy as copying them to the Google Drive folder on your computer. They’ll automatically be uploaded.

While uploading, they’ll have some blue arrows. For some reason when I dragged in two files at once, they were stacked on top of each other and I couldn’t separate them.

Once they were uploaded, they had green checkmarks and I was good to go.

Google Drive OCR

The PDFs that I copied to Google Drive were not searchable, but when I logged in to the web interface and typed a phrase from the PDF, it found it right away.

When I clicked on the document, I could see that it is now searchable and could find and highlight text.

Unfortunately, when I downloaded the PDF, it was the original non-searchable PDF. The text was not embedded. Oh well, can’t win them all.

Google sets limitations on what type of PDFs can be OCRed. You can read about them here.

OCR Quality

To test OCR quality, I did the same test as in my OCR Smackdown post. Here are the results:

The spreadsheet has become the virtual “slide rule” for CMAS. It’s used for everything from preliminary strategic plans to ñnancial statements. As with any familiar method, it finds its way into numerous situations where better alternatives are available, rnost significantly in its widespread use as a de facto reporting tool.
The appeal of the spreadsheet as the quickest Way to get a report out is not hard to appreciate. “Excel is probably the most comfortable environment for a lot of iìnancial professionals,” Alok Ajmera, vice­president, professional services with Mississauga, Ont.-based Prophix Software, says. “There’s a very little learning curve, you can effectively do whatever you want with the data, and it works fairly well in smaller organizations.”
Periodic and complex reporting in processes like revenue management or cost management, however, is where the spreadsheet model really starts to break down.

Already Searchable Documents

This is a weird one. You would think that if you uploaded a document that was already searchable, Google Drive’s search would use that text. Unfortunately, no.

I am not sure if this is a bug or by design, but people are complaining that Google Drive can’t find text in documents that were OCRed prior to uploading. I was able to replicate the behavior.

I really hope they fix this, because it makes things much less useful.

Wrap-Up

Google Drive’s OCR capabilities work more or less as advertised. Given some of the limitations, I am not sure that I would want to rely on the service for all my OCR or synchronization needs, but if you are already a heavy user of Google’s services and don’t already have a scanner with OCR capabilities, it is certainly better than nothing for the price.

Any Google Drive users out there? How do you like it for document storage?

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2011

• How To Make Spotlight Index Your Sparse Bundle
  If you have your documents stored in an encrypted sparse bundle on your Mac, you may need to do this to have Spotlight index them.

• GTD And Going Paperless – Filing Documents
  Awesome guest post by Alex Satrapa.

2010

• FineReader Mac Update For ScanSnap Works For Older ScanSnaps Too
  Not sure if this is still valid, but it was cool at the time.

• CrashPlan Is A Cross-Platform Backup Solution With Some Clever Options
  This was my first exposure to CrashPlan, which I now use for online and offsite backup.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)

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He’s a lawyer, sure, but he also runs an incredibly useful website called MacSparky, and I am not just saying that because my iPhone’s home screen is Internet-famous there.

David is also one half of the dynamic duo that produces a podcast called Mac Power Users, and a recurring topic there is going paperless.

A while ago, I heard on the Twitter grapevine that he was working on a book about going paperless, and I was intrigued. Would it be a physical book like his last one, iPad At Work? Would it be an eBook in PDF format?

It turns out[1] that it was none of the above. David has created a multimedia guide that includes images, movies, and interactive elements. It is pretty crazy.

A few things to note before I go more into it:

1. It is iPad only. You need to have an iPad to read it, and you can only read it on the iPad.
2. It is pretty big. It includes 32 screencasts, and is around 800 Megs, so don’t be worried if it takes a while to download, and make sure that you have enough space on your device.
3. It is focused solely on going paperless with the Mac and iOS. No Windows, no Android, no HP Envy XYZ Secret Spectre UltraSuperBooks.
4. It is only $5!

If after that you want to ignore the rest of this post and buy it, head on over to the iBooks store.

Oh, a minor disclaimer: David was kind enough to link to DocumentSnap in the Appendix. I had no idea he was going to do that, and my review would be the same either way.

About The Content

Paperless starts with a discussion of why you might want to go paperless, and then jumps right in with a brief overview of a paperless workflow.

It then covers the following high-level topics:

• Capturing information using a scanner and a mobile device.
• Processing your information: naming it, storing it, and backing it up.
• Working with PDFs on your Mac and iPad

He then goes through his own personal workflow, which is helpful.

Even if you have never read MacSparky or listened to Mac Power Users, it will be very clear from reading this that David really knows his stuff. He has spent a lot of time thinking about his tools and workflow, and has tried to make it as efficient as possible.

One thing I like about the guide is that it is strongly infused with his opinion. If he thinks something should be done a certain way, or if he thinks doing something is a waste of time, he will say so.

There are some cases where I personally do things differently, but that is what is great about this stuff: there is no one right way to do it, and we all need to do what works for us.

About The Format

This is my first experience with an eBook created with the new iBooks Author that Apple released back in January, and I have to say: this is the future.

There are videos and interactive images embedded right in the book, so if you are reading about something and want to see how it works, you can just tap on the page and it will play the video for you right then and there. If you have an AppleTV, you can even stream the video using AirPlay and watch it on your TV. This is the sort of thing that books on a tablet[2] make possible.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, this means that the downloads are quite large, and it means that you can only read it on your iPad. I know that some people may want to read it another way[3].

Should You Buy It?

If you use a Mac, have an iPad, and want a great guide to going paperless, I think David has hit it out of the park with Paperless. At only $5, it is definitely worth the money. I am really looking forward to seeing what other Field Guides he has cooking.

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There are a number of different ways to scan to Lucion FileCenter, a Windows document management software. This video covers three of them:

1. Using the built-in Scan button
2. Using a Fujitsu ScanSnap
3. Using any device to save to the Inbox

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

This video on scanning to FileCenter is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

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Today’s featured DocumentSnap reader is Sue Campbell, and it is an amazing one.

Here’s my story about going paperless. Actually, the paper in my life was only a small
part of my problem in the beginning. My biggest hurdle to start out with was a truly
limiting belief that “I can’t do this”. But, thanks to persistence and a guiding hand in the form of DocumentSnap.com, I now see myself as totally competent in managing our finances. I’ve been married for 50 years, and my husband has been handling all that for the majority of that time. Over the course of the 50 years, somehow I got it into my mind that it was beyond my capability. Nuts? Sure, but that’s what I used to think.

My path to competency and a paperless world all started with my husband getting a
diagnosis of lung cancer at the beginning of January. He immediately started going
downhill, having little time or energy to pay bills, track investments, etc. Then he had
surgery, which unfortunately was unsuccessful. And before he had recovered from that, they started six weeks of radiation treatments on him, rendering him totally depleted in energy, and sleeping most of the day.

In the middle of all that, our income taxes were due. OMG! I knew, that because of
his health, my husband couldn’t even start putting that together. He had used Turbotax for years, but the idea of digging into that myself brought on total panic.

However, one day the thought occurred to me that you don’t have to be smart to use Turbotax. In fact, I bet that some pretty stupid people use Turbotax just fine. So I said to myself, “One step at a time, girl. If it doesn’t work, you can always hire it out.” So I dug in, and before I knew it our taxes were filed. Eureka! I also learned that this kind of thing was fun.

Now here’s where the paperless part comes in. After filing the taxes, the big question
was “where do I put the paper documentation?” My husband’s system had him
amassing huge files and boxes of paper, some going back 15 years. If it was going
to fall to me to keep our finances from here on, I knew that wasn’t going to be the way I was going to handle it.

It was right about that time I ‘happened’ upon the DocumentSnap.com website
(amazing how the angels manage things, isn’t it?) I read everything I could on the
site, bought the Paperless Document Organization Guide, and started studying. I felt like I had jumped into really deep water, but I was determined to learn how to swim.

Throwing caution to the wind, I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 scanner, and started gathering all the tax documentation for my first scanning session. The FileCenter software I bought to accompany the scanner made everything SO easy. I also loved the fact that (with FileCenter) my files weren’t tucked away in some propriety software, and I could find
them easily.

I was giddy with accomplishment! I then tackled all the investment reports, and the
bill-paying papers from the beginning of the year. The scanner couldn’t have been
easier to work, and FileCenter became my best friend. Then I bought the final piece
in my paperless setup…a Fellows W11C cross-cut shredder. What fun that gizmo is!
Loose paper doesn’t have a chance around here any more. I bag it up in clear plastic
bags, and the recycling people love me.

Excel spreadsheets completed my paperless journey. My husband kept track of our
investments for years on multiple huge sheets of ledger paper. No more! Now that I’m the one overseeing that duty, I’ve set up Excel spreadsheets for everything. Even for the monthly bill-paying. (And they’re color-coded! Heck, why not have fun with this?)

And that’s what has surprised me about this whole story– I found out it’s FUN. From panic to fun….who’d’ve thought it?

So, that’s my story. I owe you a huge THANK YOU. You came along at the perfect
time in my life. Keep up the good work. And keep reminding the scaredy-cats out
there that they can do it.

Thanks so much Sue! I almost don’t know what to say about this story. It is amazing what we can do when we are thrown into a situation, isn’t it? You are my new hero.

If you have questions for Sue, leave a comment and I will try to get them answered.

(Photo by stevendepolo)

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2011

• Box.net Does Business Collaboration
  Some of the integration and collaboration features of Box.net

• Set Up Your Paperless Tax Workflow – Avoid Ripples
  Once again, it is a good time to start thinking of your paperless workflow with respect to your tax stuff.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)

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I want to go paperless, but my spouse is not on board. How can I convince him or her that it is a good idea?

It can be frustrating when you are enthusiastic about making a life change, but others in your family are not. This is why I was so happy when Erin from Unclutterer posted this question a while ago: Ask Unclutterer: How do I convince my spouse to get rid of unnecessary papers?

The whole post is filled with great advice.

Kat, the first thing you need to do is accept that you live with paper keepers and stackers. It’s who they are. They were this way before you married into the family two years ago, and you will never be able to force them into becoming shredders, scanners, and filers. As much as you want to, you can’t force anyone into being an unclutterer.

Don’t stop at reading the article. The comment section has a lot of good tips too. I especially like the one from reader Loren on 2/24/2012.[1]

One thing that I usually tell people to remember is that usually resistance to these sorts of changes is based on fear: fear of the unknown, fear that things will be “lost”, fear that they won’t be able to find what they are looking for. The best way to combat fear is to show, don’t tell, and demonstrate small successes.

Also, remember, the whole point of doing all this is to reduce stress, not create it. What you may need to do is do the scanning and processing steps of going paperless, but then pack the paper out of the way somewhere. That way, you are free from visible clutter, you have your documents scanned and findable, but your significant other feels less stressed out because nothing is “thrown away”.

Have you had a situation like this? How did you deal with it?

(Photo by sambeckwith)

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View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

This video on checking which Dropbox files have changed is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

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