Taming the Paper Monster

By Wayne Maruna

It was a bad night for TV. As I channel surfed, I clicked down to local cable channel 10 where I found a rebroadcast of “Around Town with Linda Staunch”. Linda was interviewing Peggy Barnes who operates a local service business called The DeClutter Bug (http://www.declutterbugnc.com).  Having just returned with my wife from Florida where we had to deal with cleaning out her elderly parents’ condo after they moved to assisted living, this was a subject near and dear to both our hearts.

            Several years ago a popular bumper sticker read “He who dies with the most toys…Wins!”  Hopefully we have all come to recognize how foolish that sentiment is, but it sure hasn’t curbed our society’s acquisition tendencies.  We now have several regular TV series dealing with obsessive hoarding, de-cluttering, and storage wars.  The reality is, as we get older, we either no longer see what is right in front of us or we lack the energy to do something about it.

            It didn’t help that my wife came back from FL with the car’s back seat filled with more ‘treasures’ from her parents’ condo.  My hands were not entirely clean; I brought back a can of WD40, a screw driver, and a tube of all-purpose glue – it’s a guy thing. I’d have brought back duct tape but there was none to be had.

            Anyway, back at the C-TV10 show, Linda asked Peggy what the one biggest problem was, and Peggy said “The Paper Monster”.  People let paper clutter rule their life.  Apparently because it is easy to set aside for another time and because each additional piece seems pretty innocuous, there is a tendency to put off dealing with paper.  I’ve seen first hand evidence of this, having spent days in FL going through papers accumulated over the years, 95% of which ended up shredded.  My own mother, who recently passed away after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, had a bad case of paper clutter and eventually had to move to another bedroom because her own room became a warehouse of newspapers and magazines that she was eventually going to get around to read.  Yeah, right. 

In my work life, I aspired, usually unsuccessfully, to try to touch paper only once – either dealing with it right then, or disposing of it.  Once consigned to the to-do pile, it was likely to became a long term office tenant.

So how does all this fit into what is normally a monthly computer article? 

            Two days after watching the show, I was thumbing through Time Magazine when I saw an ad for a company called Neatco (www.neatco.com).  They were selling a pair of seemingly over-priced scanners that came with software that claimed to simplify the task of saving scanned documents – receipts, business cards, letters - into readily accessible folders on your computer.  It got me to thinking.  What could I do to take a step toward curbing my own use of precious storage space?  Since I had collected a lot of paperwork specific to my in-laws’ needs, my lateral file drawer where I keep various records was filled to capacity.  I vowed that I would no longer put anything other than mandatory legal records in that drawer.  From now on, everything would get scanned into my computer.  I already had the hardware – why not make greater use of it?  I was already in the habit of scanning in my mother’s banking records.  Why not start electronically storing my own stuff?  Why should I need four file drawers in my den to keep paper that someday my son may have to deal with?  The time to start is now! (Of course, this makes timely backups of my computer critical.)

            I found out that my newest scanner (a Canon LIDE 110 model) has a pretty neat feature where it will scan documents directly into PDF files, and I can scan multiple related pages all into one inclusive file.  Truth be told, I did not even know it could do that before scanning in and then discarding my 2011 medical receipts.  Being a desktop scanner, it lacks the automated document feed and one-pass duplex scanning features of the Neatco scanners, but at $55 versus $199 or $399 for the Neatco scanners, I’ll live with that.  I just have to be persistent about scanning documents as I acquire them and not letting them pile up.  Medical receipts now, the world tomorrow!  My son will one day thank me.   

            Now if there was just a way to scan in all that old computer gear filling up my den closet…..