Cut the clutter; from banking online to digitizing documents, nine homeworkers share their secrets for paper-free productivity

Home Office Computing, August, 1998 by John R. Quain

From banking online to digitizing documents, nine homeworkers share their secrets for paper-free productivity

Some paper tigers just don't respond to the whip. Take a look around your home office: piles of correspondence in one corner, article clips in another, stacks of books on your shelf. When you placed them there, you probably thought all this information was so important it had to be at your fingertips. But be honest--you can't remember what it was that was so vital about those things anyway. In fact, as you scan your incredibly shrinking workspace, there are probably few papers that you really need.

The solution? Chuck your home office dreck and digitize the important information, so you can call it up in an instant on your computer. The result? You'll be more efficient, save time and money, and won't have to cram vital papers into overstuffed file cabinets. So what's holding you back?

"The problem is psychological. Logic dictates that you should be working without paper," says Tom Culley, author of Beating the Odds in Small Business (Simon and Schuster). "But your first concern is to get your work done. Sometimes, you just don't have the time to set up the hardware and software to go paperless."

The first step to a streamlined office is an investment of time--enough time, that is, to develop an organized system and to master your computer equipment. "To go paperless requires more than one or two hours," says Culley. "You have to dedicate weekends, nights, and days to learn the technology."

The following homeworkers have put in their time--and don't regret it. Here, they share their secrets for a paperless home office.

Salvation in Scanning

Father Jacob Myers has faith in more ways than one. For more than six years, he's trusted his scanner and optical character-recognition software to help him create Tree of Life, a quarterly magazine published by his parish, the St. John Eastern Orthodox Church in Atlanta, Ga. Instead of storing long manuscripts, article clips, and correspondence and keying them into his office PC, Father Myers feeds potential magazine copy into his flatbed scanner. Within minutes, Caere's OmniPage Pro 8.0 (800-736-5735, www.caere.com; Win 95/NT or Mac; $99) OCR software turns his paperwork into text he can edit onscreen.

Although Father Myers works with a Umax Vista-S6E scanner, OmniPage Pro is also compatible with such products as the Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 5S and the Microtek ScanMaker E6, both retailing for less than $300 (for more on low-cost flatbed scanners, see this month's Hardware Buyer's Guide; for document management software, see this month's Software Buyer's Guide). Best of all, the program was easy to master, says Father Myers: "I just lay an unedited manuscript on the scanner, outline the section I want converted to digital text, and that's it.

"I can't afford an assistant, so the technology is my secretary," he explains. "Now the only paper I need is the paper Tree of Life is printed on."

As divine as this sounds, Culley points out that just scanning pages into your computer won't necessarily make you a model of efficiency. "You may still struggle with your computer files," he says. One product that will help you organize your electronic file folders within a small home office space is Visioneer's PaperPort Strobe (800-787-7007, www.visioneer.com; Win 95, $199; Mac, $249). This scanner's footprint is no larger than your keyboard, and its OCR software works with more than 185 programs.

If you find the process of scanning, storing, and tracking all of your paperwork too daunting, Culley suggests that you start modestly. At first, he advises, "just deal with administrative documents."

Boot Up and Batch Business Cards As VP of marketing and sales for Arnold Industries, an industrial distributor of bolts, nuts, electronic components, and more in Canton, Mass., telecommuter Rick Ferenchick often used to be bogged down in administrative tasks. For example, the process of cataloging the hundreds of business cards he'd collected from potential customers would take hours. And when he traveled, he'd have to drag along four or five loose leaf notebooks filled with clients' business cards.

Now Ferenchick has found a paperless solution. "I scan cards into my computer using Corex's CardScan Plus (800-316-9758, www.cardscan.com; $299), store them into my contact manager, then update the entire mailing list on my PalmPilot Professional (3Com/Palm Computing, 8008 81-7256, www.palmpilot.com; $299)," he says. And because Arnold Industries regularly participates in trade shows, the business-card scanner and software are crucial in maintaining Ferenchick's prospective client list. To generate sales leads, he says, "we collect about 400 business cards at each show. Using CardScan, I import them into [Symantec's] Act!, sort them according to sales territory, then distribute them to my salespeople. It saves me time, so I can sell instead of doing administrative work."