George bought us a nifty little scanner. Geeky details on that here. He is scanning all documents that we have whose contents we don’t want to lose forever, and for which we do not require originals to be kept on file. Things like old bank statements, bills, receipts…all those things you hang on to “just in case” and they end up piling into huge piles.
AND! If you have to find something specific? GOOD LUCK!
He’s been scanning things in bulk at the moment with seemingly no rhyme or reason, but it is all searchable. So if I want to find receipts from the purchase of my running shoes from Moosejaw from 6 months ago, I can just do a keyword search for “Moosejaw” and every single page he scanned that contains that word will pop up for me to review. Nice!
So what is the content of the majority of my random paper files? Much of the same statements, marginally important records and receipts, with the addition of a ridiculous quantity of cooking magazines. I have tried the possibility of just pulling out recipes I want and pitching the rest, but once you find one recipe you like, others follow, and pretty much you have the entire magazine still left, minus the cover and a few ads.
George’s brilliant idea? Cut them at the binding and stick them in the scanner! We did a test run on two issues of Cooking Light. The drawback was that this magazine has an equal amount of recipes, health articles and ads. I have a 2′ pile of issues I had already begun to dismember a few years back, so I’m going to start there, remove the ads and articles and hand him piles organized by year. He is going to turn around and scan them, grouping the files into Magazine Name and Year. Possibly month, but that almost doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I can search for recipes on this thing.
And I don’t have to either make the impossible choice of which Cooks Illustrated needs to go, or figure out how the hell I’m going to store these in a way that they don’t get in the way, and I can actually reference them. Hooray!
I’ll close by saying that we are seeing sections of floor in George’s office that haven’t seen the light of day in at least 5 years. Im inspired.
I’m going to go change my laundry, and start purging cooking magazines. I encourage you to consider doing the same.
xo
en