Meet Your New Paperless Office

The idea of a paperless office may sound enticing, or even inspiring. It may also sound intimidating. If you make the transition to a paperless lifestyle, what steps will you have to take—and what will you get in return? In this chapter I look at the advantages of a paperless office (ranging from obvious to novel), and then describe some of its crucial components. I also help you imagine what your paperless office will ultimately look like.

Learn the Benefits of Ditching Paper

If you’re reading this book, chances are you already have a paper-related problem you’re trying to solve. You know the ways in which paper is causing you pain, so it’s apparent how a paperless office would be soothing. But, in fact, a paperless office can solve many problems simultaneously—including some you didn’t even realize you had! Let’s look what you can accomplish by moving from paper to digital:

• Reduce clutter. Clutter reduction is a recurring theme in this ebook. “Clutter” may refer to the untidy piles of papers that litter your desk and haphazard filing systems, but even a scrupulously organized collection of paper documents counts as clutter if it takes up too much physical space—or too much of your attention—for comfort. Scaling back on paper brings order back to your office, and also frees up space on your desk and in your brain.
• Save time and effort. Filing a single document may take just seconds, but the endless process of filing, searching for, retrieving, and replacing papers can add up to hours per week. You’ll still file digital documents, but searching will take far less time and be less error-prone—plus there’s nothing to put back when you’re done.
• Save money. In a paperless office, you save a little bit of money on paper (hey, it’s not that expensive in the first place), but when you add up the savings in printers, photocopiers, ink or toner cartridges, envelopes, file folders, filing cabinets, extra office space to hold all the filing cabinets, and so on, the amount becomes more interest­ing. Even better, you’re saving time (the previous point), which means you can be more productive.
• Search everything. You already know that you can search the files on your Mac easily. Wouldn’t it be great if an electronic search could also turn up documents you’ve received in the mail, your old school records, business cards you received years ago, posters you saw hanging at the supermarket, and any other piece of text that you’ve encountered? (How about this: It took me about 2 minutes to deter­mine that my father got an F on his final French exam in 11th grade because I had scanned all his old report cards!)
• Share documents easily. Printing or photocopying documents—and then handing them or mailing them to other people—is so 20th century. I can share digital documents with nearly anyone in a few clicks, and why shouldn’t that ease extend to paper documents?
• Back up physical documents. You back up your digital photos and business documents (don’t you?), but what if your tax returns, insurance records, contracts, and other crucial papers were lost in a fire or other disaster? Create digital versions and you can back them up too. As a bonus, you can give yourself remote access to all your scanned documents—something that’s tricky to pull off with paper!
• Save the planet. I like to think I’m as concerned about the envi­ronment as the next guy, but my interest in reducing paper con­sump­tion has nothing to do with saving trees, eliminating waste, shrinking my carbon footprint, or any such thing—although it does all that too! I do it because it makes me happier, and it just so hap­pens that it’s good for the planet (at least in a small way) as well.

Understand Searchable PDFs

Although a paperless office has many aspects, one central principle is that many documents that are currently on paper will end up on your computer—in a single special format. That format is officially called “PDF Searchable Image,” but most people refer to it using the less-cumbersome term “searchable PDF.” Because this one unique format is the magical key that makes the whole system work, I want to give you a quick overview of the most common PDF (portable document format) varieties so you can see where searchable PDFs fit.

The PDF files most of us encounter daily were created in an app like Pages or Microsoft Word—nearly any app that can produce printed output. Except instead of printing, the document is saved in PDF format, which is relatively compact and looks almost exactly the same on any platform. When an app “prints to PDF,” the new PDF automat­ically contains searchable text. (There are occasional exceptions for text treated as objects, such as Word’s Word Art and Excel tables embedded in a Word document.) That means, among other things, that you can select and copy text in these PDFs, and that search engines such as Spotlight index their contents. This sort of run-of-the-mill PDF is officially called “PDF Normal.”

Normal PDFs can include graphics—either vector artwork or bitmaps that originally came from a scanner or a digital camera. But the PDF format can also be used as a simple wrapper around plain bitmapped images (for example TIFFs and JPEGs) without any other content. This second sort of PDF is officially called “PDF Image Only.”

When you scan documents, your scanning software will probably save PDF Image Only files initially. But then a second process occurs: optical character recognition (OCR), which identifies letters and words in the image. Years ago, OCR produced a plain text file as output or, if you were lucky, an ugly Word file. But today the most popular way to handle the recognized text is to add it as an invisible layer above the bitmapped graphic, with the position of the live text corresponding to the position of the characters in the graphic. So, underneath you may have a graphic with dots that look like the word “sandwich,” and on top of that image is the text of the same word, which you can select, copy, or search just like the text in any normal PDF. This is the PDF Searchable Image, or searchable PDF format.

The enormous advantage of searchable PDF over plain-text OCR out­put is that you can still see exactly what the original document looked like. And, if you were to print it again, it would look almost identical to the source document. Because no OCR tool is perfect, this also lets you verify what the document actually says, even if the recognized text has some errors.

Meanwhile, the advantage over plain bitmapped images is that you can index, search, and use the text as text—even if you’re not always dili­gent or accurate when it comes to naming the scanned files. With search­able PDFs you can, for example, type a restaurant name into your search field and instantly see the scanned receipts that mention it, and you won’t have to know filenames or dates in order to find them.

Searchable PDFs are a wonderful thing, and because they’re the only way I know of to get this dual-layer effect automatically from an OCR app, every document you create as a result of using the instructions in this book will be in that format.

Consider Storage Options

If your paper files are in a filing cabinet, then whatever disadvantages paper may have, you can at least be certain that none of the files will spontaneously evaporate, or lose part of their contents, due to a filing cabinet malfunction. Unfortunately, the same is not true of digital data. Digital files typically live on a hard disk or SSD (solid-state drive) somewhere. And digital storage, by its very nature, is subject to all sorts of problems ranging from random directory corruption to user error to theft, not to mention just plain wearing out over time (a bigger problem with mechanical hard drives than with SSDs). So before you begin committing your files to disk—and especially before you get rid of the originals—think about where and how you’ll store the digital files themselves and the physical media they rely on.

I recommend, in particular, taking a moment at the outset to think about three main factors: disk capacity, local versus cloud storage, and media longevity. (Later in the ebook, I talk in more detail about another essential consideration: backups. See Back Up Scanned Data.)

Disk Capacity

If you follow the instructions in Configure Your Software, you’ll end up with nicely compact PDF files, and you may be able to fit hundreds or even thousands of pages worth of scanned data in just a few gigabytes of disk space. However, keep in mind that your data storage needs will inevitably grow over time. And, if you have tens of thousands of sheets to scan—especially if many of them are in color—you’ll need plenty of room for your data to expand.

In these days when bare 4 TB drives can be found for under $100, it doesn’t make sense to skimp on capacity. If your Mac’s internal disk still has loads of free space, then you may be all set, but if in doubt, you might want to consider upgrading it to a more capacious model, or supplementing it with an external drive.

Because there are so many hard drives and SSDs to choose from, I can’t begin to give recommendations for brands or models. But I can say that for storing your digital archives, it’s worth paying a bit extra for a longer warranty—7 years is the longest I’ve seen, while 3–5 years is more common. And, all things being equal, if you purchase an exter­nal drive, buy one with the fastest interface your Mac supports. For example, Thunderbolt 3 is faster than Thunderbolt 2, which is faster than Thunderbolt and USB 3.1 (Gen 2), which are faster than USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 (Gen 1), which are faster than FireWire 800, which is faster than FireWire 400, which is faster—in practice if not on paper—than USB 2.0. Although SSDs are far faster and more reliable than mechanical hard drives, they also come at a somewhat higher cost, so you’ll have to factor that into your decision.

In any case, check to see which ports your Mac has, or which you can add by way of an adapter.

Local vs. Cloud Storage

Although hard disks are still, in 2017, the main medium used for stor­ing digital data, those disks need not sit in your office. They might just as easily be attached to a server somewhere in the bowels of an anony­mous data center halfway around the world. Companies that traffic in data storage and transfer (including Amazon.com, Google, and count­less others) offer data storage in the cloud at reasonable rates—per­haps less per year than what it would cost you to buy a new hard drive.

The advantages of cloud storage for your formerly paper documents are many—for example:

• Space savings: Hard drives take up space in your office, so if they’re not in your office, you have less clutter.
• Accessibility: With cloud-based storage, you can access your data from any computer in the world with an Internet connection, which may not be true of disks in your home or office. You can also more easily sync your files with other devices.
• Redundancy: Cloud storage providers generally use RAID along with automated backups to protect your data against drive failures and user error. And, when used in conjunction with local storage, cloud storage gives you a second, offsite copy of your data that provides extra insurance against hardware and software gremlins. (Cloud storage as such isn’t necessarily the same as online backup, however; see Back Up Scanned Data for details on the latter.)
• Maintenance: If a hard drive in your office dies or runs out of space, you have to buy a new one and copy all your data from a backup—a lengthy and tedious process. Cloud storage providers have systems in place to keep their equipment up to date and in good working order, relieving you of that burden.

The biggest downside to cloud storage is that it’s much slower to copy data to or from the cloud than to store it locally. Unless you work for a large company with an Internet connection that costs more than the CEO’s annual salary, you’ll get dramatically better speeds with local hard drives. If the amount of data you want to store in the cloud reaches the tens of gigabytes or more, expect it to take weeks to upload over a moderately fast broadband connection.

There are ways around this—for example, some online storage services let you fill a hard drive and send it to them via courier in order to seed your online space; then, you add files to your online space as you go, which is far quicker. Even so, other potential problems remain. What if your Internet connection goes down and you can’t get at your files? What if the storage provider goes out of business? The potential perils of cloud-based storage are such that I wouldn’t recommend it as the sole place to keep your valuable scanned documents. However, I think the cloud makes an excellent secondary location for such files (just as it does for backups).

Cloud storage providers are multiplying quickly, and I wouldn’t even attempt to catalog all the options. However, I can call your attention to a few services that let you store a significant volume of files online at a reasonable cost, and sync them with your Mac and other devices so that you can simply save files in one location and have them automag­ically transported to the other as well. Some examples:

• Amazon Drive: $59.99 per year for unlimited storage.
• Box: 10 GB free; paid plans start at $5 per month for 100 GB.

• CloudMe: 3 GB free; paid plans start at €1 per month for 10 GB.
• DollyDrive: No permanent free storage, but a 14-day trial is avail­able. Plans start at $10 per month for 250 GB and go up to 8 TB (for $198 per month).
• Dropbox: Dropbox offers excellent performance and compatibility, and I’ve become a big fan—so much so that I wrote a book about it: Take Control of Dropbox. Anyone can store 2 GB for free; 1 TB of storage costs $9.99 per month.
• Google Drive: Along with Web-based editing of word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents, Google Drive lets you store files of any type. You get up to 15 GB of storage free; 100 GB costs $1.99 per month, and higher-capacity plans are available all the way up to 30 TB for $299.99 per month.
• iCloud Drive: Part of Apple’s iCloud service. Includes 5 GB of free storage (shared across iCloud apps); paid plans start at $0.99 per month for 50 GB and go up to $19.99 per month for 2 TB.
• Microsoft OneDrive: Formerly known as SkyDrive. 5 GB free; paid plans start at $1.99 per month for 50 GB.
• SpiderOak One: Plans start at $5 per month for 100 GB; a free 21-day, 250 GB trial is available.
• SugarSync: Plans start at $7.49 per month for 100 GB; a 30-day free trial is available.

Media Longevity

As I mentioned earlier, hard drives, like all mechanical devices, eventually wear out, so if you’re using them to store documents that you need to keep indefinitely, you should make accommodations for the drives’ likely life spans. (The same, of course, is true of any media—CDs, DVDs, and even solid-state storage degrade over time, although at least in those cases you need not worry about mechanical wear.)

Specifically, I suggest incorporating the following into your paperless office plan:

• Replace your physical media every 3–5 years. I begin to lose faith in hard drives after about 3 years of continuous use, and after 5 years or so, I don’t trust them at all. (Of course, I generally up­grade all my computers every few years anyway, so new hard drives or SSDs are just part of the deal.) Conventional recordable CDs and DVDs tend to last longer—especially if they’re not used frequently and are kept in a cool, dry, dark place. But for long-term storage, it’s still a smart habit to copy all your files onto fresh new media every 3–5 years (and verify that all the files on the new media are intact).

• When feasible, buy higher-quality media. A name brand hard drive with a 5-year warranty isn’t guaranteed to last longer than an off-brand model with a 1-year warranty, but the odds are in your favor. Similarly, it’s possible to buy rather pricey archival CDs and DVDs, which the manufacturers claim will last much longer than ordinary optical media. That’s not a guarantee, but it improves your chances.
• Don’t forget to back up! Backing up is always essential, but never more so than when you choose to dispose of original paper copies. A backup can save you from worn-out media among dozens of other problems. See Back Up Scanned Data for details.

Envision a Paperless Future

All right, you’ve seen the benefits of a paperless office and you know some of the details about where you’re headed—document formats and storage media and so forth—but what does your future day-to-day work look like without all the paper? If you can picture it, you’re more likely to make it happen.

When you get to the chapter Create a Workflow for Incoming Paper you can read all the details, but in the meantime, here’s the overall vision I’d like you to aim for:

• You enjoy a clean desktop. Where once stood stacks of papers (not to mention magazines and books), you now have clear view of your actual desktop, which you may not have seen in years. You can use that space for a second monitor, or an iPad, or pictures of your kids. And as your filing cabinets begin to empty out, you think about putting a nice decorative ficus in their place.
• You receive much less incoming paper. You’ve taken meas­ures to ensure that most of the documents coming your way do so electronically, so you’re not spending hours a day scanning.
• You use your scanner regularly. You may still (or for the first time) have In and Out boxes, but they’ll take on new meaning. In will contain papers you’ve only just received and will scan by the end of the day. Out will contain papers that have been scanned, and can be shredded, recycled, or filed. In between them sits a shiny scanner, which has become your new best friend. (I elaborate on the setup you might employ later, in Create a Physical Paper Path.)
• You practice good habits. Scanning need not be labor-intensive at all; you can set things up (see Configure Your Software) such that you do nothing more than press a button and move on to the next document. However, you may choose to get in the habit of expend­ing a wee bit more effort as you scan to make it easier to find docu­ments later. In any case, you’ll scan all incoming documents as soon as reasonably feasible after you receive them.
• You find documents easily. When you need a document you’ve scanned, you usually know exactly where to look on your Mac. Using either the Finder or any of numerous document-management tools, you do a quick search for anything whose location isn’t obvious, and it appears on your screen in seconds.
• You generate little or no outgoing paper. Your printer may be used so seldom it gets lonely. It’s still there for times when paper is obligatory, but you no longer print, photocopy, or mail paper as a matter of course.