Every day the mailman comes to my house these days, I am reminded of the late, great Roy Scheider in “Jaws,” remarking, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

My family is literally drowning in paper, from bills to IRA statements to annual reports to prospectuses to personal letters. And our efforts to file it all and thereupon purge it all at the unmistaken moment has been woefully ineffective, with the number of kids and jobs
and life issues we have going on.

I recently turned to a new concept, mainly scanning everything that arrives in the door and shredding the paper. The notion is pretty simple. My bills are more or less paid automatically, anyway. I only keep a checkbook around for the seemingly unending number of checks I need to write for Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and school lunches. So I can look at the statements and use a small autofeed scanner to record the statement for

The one I am using is an IrisScan Executive 2, a small USB scanner about the size of a paper-towel tube (without the towels). It can scan any document, photo, letter or business card into a PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel or Outlook document in a few seconds.

In my case, I have a small home server (by small, I mean smaller than a shoebox) with a couple of redundant drives where I keep all of our critical photos and documents. The scanner is hooked up to an old laptop designated for that purpose, and the documents are automatically saved on the server.

The scanner installed in a few minutes, the optical recognition software so far has worked flawlessly, and we’re down a few shoeboxes of paper. All for less than $200.

The best part I can see is whether you were a traveling executive or salesman, I…

Orginal post by Top Tech News