This clever setup uses scanners, shredders, and custom 3D prints to stop paper and mail as soon it enters my house.
Paper is a river. Manage the flow, not the pile.
One nook, laptop, and scanner can tame daily clutter.
Shred, label, and scan right at the point of entry.
For some reason, there’s an awful lot of paper involved in going paperless.
My wife and I have been attempting to go paperless since well before the pandemic. While we have successfully scanned a tremendous number of our business and personal documents, we never seem to get ahead of the flow.
There’s always more paper. But now, we have a new plan.
Our previous attempts to tame all the paper worked from the paradigm that there would be collections of paper that needed to be scanned and processed. But that’s not the case, is it? Not really. Paper isn’t something that’s static. It doesn’t just sit there.
Paper is a flow. Paper is like a river. More comes into the house every day. Some days, when we’re diligent, more gets tossed than comes in. But even if we fill a couple of trash bags with shreddings, more still comes in.
We’ve set up scanning stations before. We even had employees work entire seasons to scan the company’s older paperwork. They were set up with a workspace, computer, and scanner. Paper got processed, but the flow kept flowing.
What we need to do is divert the river. Stop the flow at the source. To that end, we just finished building a new scanning station right at the front door. Rather than letting mail and receipts come into the house, it lands on a designated hotspot at the scanning station.
Then it gets scanned and filed on the server. If anything is immediately actionable, that gets emailed right from the front door. And then the paper gets shredded.
We’re a few weeks in, but so far it seems to be working. Let me tell you how it all works. Setting it up
We lucked out. Right next to our front door is a little nook just big enough to hold a bookcase. Even better, there’s a power socket right in that space. So we were able to set up a bunch of electronic gadgets and keep them powered, all nicely integrated into the cubby.
We started with a folding bookcase that we’re using as a standing desk. We bought the bookcase at a local wannabe Walmart, but you can get a similar one here on Amazon. The benefit of this is that the shelves are just the right height for my wife to work at them, and the back is open so cords can drop down and be out of the way.
The bookcase not only stores the gear and makes it available for easy standing desk use, it also stores a variety of shipping and mailing supplies so we can rapidly package stuff up if we have to send it out.
This works for small items. For big shipments, we still use the workbench or a large table to pack up big items. It’s a good balance. The gear
Our new scanning station integrates a fast-feed scanner, a smaller receipt scanner, a label printer, a shredder, and a Mac.
I’ll start with the Mac because it’s a repurposed 2015 laptop.
