2010 The Year of the Scanner

Image via Wikipedia

Well, perhaps I’m a bit behind the times, but I have finally decided to go totally paperless. No more filing cabinets! I’m not sure if the impetus for this decision was that I needed the space or the fact that almost all of my vendors have been pushing hard for me to go paperless. But it makes absolute sense. Bills, Bank Statements, Tax filings (most of these are already filed on line anyway these days), business cards—basically everything that used to go into a file folder will now be filed on my computer and backed up to DVDs. My electronic filing cabinet of choice is going to be Microsoft OneNote, a program I have used for several years and really like. I think the reason I like OneNote as much as I do is that it works a lot like the manual filing system I’ve used for my entire business life, so the transition was easy.

A huge advantage with OneNote is that it has the ability to read and file everything, even graphic images with text; so finding something that might have gotten inadvertently misfiled is a breeze, and a task that would probably be impossible in a manual filing system.

Deciding how/where to file business cards has been an ongoing puzzle for me. Add them to Outlook? my email list? put them in a Rolodex? put them in plastic pages designed to display them and keep them in a notebook? Each had its problems: Business cards for casual contacts in Outlook just made finding the names of current and active contacts difficult; this being compounded now that I have also decided to synchronize everything with my new Droid SmartPhone (another change for 2010). Putting them in the mailing list is a good idea, except that it’s not so easy to access them for anything other than a mass mailing. The Rolodex is just archaic, though I understand there are now ‘virtual’ Rolodex solutions for the computer. Keeping business cards in those plastic pockets that are then stored in a notebook gave me an attractive and colorful scrap-book to browse through, but you could never find a contact number if you needed one.

However, the plastic sheets did come in handy—I used them to hold the cards while I scanned them! I thought the solution was genius. Now all my cards are neatly filed in OneNote, they are all there and look pretty, (there is some sort of satisfaction by having the entire collection of cards to look at—after all, it represents years of hand-shaking and networking. I think this was the appeal of the old Rolodex, but now I have the best of both worlds. Additionally, I can continue to notate the cards, and should I want to call or make contact with someone, the annotation can automatically be added to Outlook as a task.

: Image via CrunchBase

So my ultimate solution was to enter their email addresses into LinkedIN, and copy those addresses into my mass mailing program. That way, I’d have an easy to use contact database on LinkedIN (which can also be exported to use locally or for backing up); and can send mass mailings to them, and if I need any additional information, I have the scanned, searchable copies of their business cards, which are still useful for people not on LinkedIN. (These days I’m sort of thinking that if business contacts aren’t on LinkedIN, then they probably aren’t my demographic to begin with; but so as not to prejudge, I still keep the copies of the cards.)

I should note that I have tried many, many computer filing systems in the past, with no success. There were so many reasons. Either the programs were inconvenient or the scanning process was too slow, or backing up was much more difficult and expensive, or maybe I just wasn’t ready; but finally, at least for me, all of these problems have been overcome as the technology has finally caught up to the file cabinet.