Getting back on top of all my documents with Paperwork
2024-09-22
Every single one of us gets lots of documents from all the companies we have contracts with or buy something at as well as government authorities that inform us about changes or request information et cetera. This can quickly become an utter mess of paperwork without a proper system to organize it - both in the real and digital world. I wasn't quite happy with my system, so let's look at how I got back on top of all my documents with a document management system appropriately named Paperwork...
To be clear right from the beginning, I was never one of the people who just spreads their documents all
around the house and has exactly no system to manage them at all. Instead there always was a certain
amount of organization to them, but especially with the common combination of analog as well as digital
documents today I just wasn't able to organize them satisfiably for a loooong time. For the last two
years or so, I have settled on scanning all of them regardless of their importance, giving them a
filename following the scheme
year-month-date-title-or-important-aspects
and putting them into folders on my computers, of which I create regular and safely stored backups of
course. The analog copy is then simply filed in a chronological physical folder, which holds all my
documents of various importance mixed together, as it only really is a backup solution and not needed
for referencing.
This system has the big advantage of being incredible easy to transfer between computers and operating
systems without any vendor lock-in, since everything just is PDF documents inside folders in your normal
file explorer. But due to its lovely simplicity it also has some major drawbacks that made it unbearable
for me as the time progressed. First and foremost, you have to create meaningful folders for everything
and structure them at least somewhat sensibly, which is quite a bit harder than it might sound at first.
The much bigger issue sometimes is to decide into which folder a new document fits however, as it's not
too uncommon for a single document to cover different topics and impact multiple folders. This basically
forces you to only acknowledge a sub-set of its topics or copy it multiple times, which is an
unnecessary waste of storage space. Finding documents is even worse than storing new ones though,
because you single-handedly rely on your file explorers search feature to find them, which is some cases
(I'm looking at you
explorer.exe
) can be painfully slow and almost always just looks at the filenames instead of their contents - making
it a nightmare to find important documents you know you have, but forgot where you put them.
A document management system aims to make this whole process of scanning new documents, organizing as
well as finding them much easier by directly accessing your scanner, performing OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) and allowing you to add a number of tags to them - avoiding the whole folder dilemma. Most
of them are quite complicated on their own though, require more than a bit of training to get used to
and can be quite pricey, since they are primarily used in company offices. Thankfully an Open Source one
called
Paperwork
exists that is available on all major operating system free of charge, doesn't use a proprietary storage
format or database and follows the easy to learn
Scan & Forget
metaphor.
After defining a location for the applications
papers
folder, into which all documents and related information is stored in commonly used formats, and quickly
setting up your primary scanner, you can start managing your documents by either importing existing ones
into the program or putting them on your scanner and pressing
Scan document
. The software then performs OCR on the document to make it easily searchable by its whole text and adds
the current date to the file. After that's finished you can change the date manually and add tags
(called
Labels
) as well as additional keywords as you want to make finding documents just a little easier - that is it
though, no more work required. Now you can easily search through all your documents including their
contents with little to no hassle and just get the annoying job of finding the invoice from three years
ago to claim your warranty done. Since all the computation and data storage is done locally, you also
don't have to worry about privacy concerns or data breaches - a rarity in today's world!
With that said, I highly recommend you to give Paperwork a try and start getting back on top of all your documents - just like I did. Even if you only use it for new documents - which you really shouldn't, because the import features for existing ones works remarkably well - it will offer great value to you for no cost except saving you time once you need to find that damn document. As always, feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments down below and have a lovely day...