it seems at odds with the idea of getting rid of the old, and in with the new…
maybe start with current info? it may be a turn off for those looking for fresh material and inspriation.

i love your article in Real Simple, especially the phrase that i resonate with – tear down the museum and ‘assembling a history you thought worth remembering!’ as i am in a major purge mode with a young child and dividing the house into 2 apartments. my house upside down and all storage out and sorted, it keeps me laughing – tear down the museum (well, except for the family heirloom furniture and grandfather clock!) selling off baby stuff…

i have your book on my wishlist (after i get rid of 10 boxes of books!)
thank you

I started scanning all my stuff a few years ago. I’ve worn out a couple of cheap all-in-one scanners in the process and have settled on a ScanSnap (the older S500) which is a *wonderful* device. Costly but worth it, because it makes scanning a lot less stressful.

Anyway, document naming. I make a folder for each year and name things YYYYMMDD-Name-of-correspondent.pdf or YYYYMMDD-something-descriptive.pdf So I end up with a folder full of the following sorts of names:

20090121-MyBank-statement.pdf
20090204-InsuranceCo-car-insurance-renewal.pdf
20090301-Dr-Johnson-dentist-bill.pdf

…and so on. It’s simple and too the point and pretty easy to browse. The date format (ISO Date actually) forces everything to line up in chronological order even if I do not scan things in order (I tend to let them build up for a little bit and then spend a half hour or so scanning – I hope to get better about that).

About worrying what to scan. I try to toss the junk but if I have a sliver of a doubt about whether I will need or want it, I just scan it in. The ScanSnap makes it pretty painless, and the price of hard drives today makes another file or two (or 200) not really a big deal.

The ScanSnap software takes care of OCR for me, so it’s easy to search when I’m looking for something. Don’t worry about perfect OCR. The main thing is to capture enough that search works. And even if it doesn’t (which happens on things like flimsy yellow copies of auto repair work), it’s not a big deal – manually looking through computer files named this way is almost always faster than shuffling through loads of paper.

I’m careful to back everything up to a USB drive every so often – and occasionally write everything to CD.

For me, this strategy has reduced a closetful of paper to less than a shoebox worth of disk and CDs plus a few folders of originals I cannot throw away, but have scanned anyway (birth certificates and such). And when I’m on the phone with someone who needs to know something, I can pull it up quickly.

The original mound of paper was daunting. And the frustrations borne of cheap all-in-one scanners definitely raised my temperature and stalled me a few times. But since getting the ScanSnap it has become easy and painless.

*Very* worthwhile decluttering project, in my opinion!

- Passport pages photo copied
- Visa (residency permit)
- Work permit
- CC cards front and back
- Lease information
- account numbers for 3 US banks including routing info
- account numbers for utilities for US house
- account numbers for 2 Chinese banks
- Chinese house lease
- Family member information (contact, SS#, passport)
- voided checks
- airline miles
- hotel membership cards

Can you imagine if I really carried all these things around!!!

I keep them all in my locked iPhone which I can remotely wipe clean if stolen.

Also, using NeatDesk’s Neat Reciepts – works just fine BUT definitely recommend using the PDF function instead of scan and saving documents directly to your desktop in files you create.

Too arduous using their filing system and then having to open up Neat Receipts in order to search your saved files.

Evernote tips?

I’m sure there are obvious examples (birth records, social security card)–I’m looking for the less obvious examples. Any tips?

I’m also known for my paper purging at work. My predecessors seemed to save every scrap of paper, even for obsolete processes and technologies. I reduced the paper storage for my job from 4 packed file drawers to one, and cut the paper used in my job by two-thirds.

Regarding the adoption paperwork — how do you decide what to keep? Of course we’ll keep all legal documents and referral paperwork, but what about copies of applications, notes about phone calls, etc? Right now I have pretty much everything associated with each adoption. I wish I could know which pieces of paper would be important to my children. I can’t provide them with their birth family’s history, but I can show them what this family went through.

I’ve also been keeping copies of whatever I send to my kids’ files at their adoption agencies.

Realistically, I have a lot of other paper that I could get rid of that would make much more of an impact clutter-wise, but this post got me thinking.

Also, to the adoptees who have posted — as an adoptive parent, I really appreciate your comments — thank you!

I called the Freedom Filer people to see what copy-write restrictions they had because I wanted the computer/scanned system to be the exact set-up as the paper system. They were all for it. I now scan in everything, file it in the database, and either shred most, or save the few physical copies of things like warranties, certificates, etc. I can run a search on the computer if I really can’t remember where I filed something, and that will tell me where to find the paper copy. However, the simplicity of the system really doesn’t allow you to lose things. There are also a lot of blank labels to personalize the system. The best part, it teaches you to purge on a very regular basis.

Like those above, I am doing stacks of a few inches at a time. I’ve cleared several boxes so far, and hope to have the rest done, bit by bit, by the end of February.

I saw Freedom Filer mentioned sometime after we moved (and moved tons of paper) last year, and after figuring out the basic idea of it, created my own version ($42 for filing labels seemed a bit insane, but after trying to make my own, would have TOTALLY been worth it). Anyway, I have been using a version of that system for about a year and it works for us. Every paper has a place, so when things come in, we know where to put them. Even better, when we need to find one, we know where it is! My favorite part of it is that you have separate files for things that update (insurance policies, credit card agreements, etc) and when the new one comes in, you know where the old one is and it goes away immediately. That was our biggest problem – we kept putting things in and never taking things out. I can’t tell you how much uncluttering that has done for us! (And no, I have NOTHING to do with them, just love their method)