Paperless?
My question is:
WHY ISN’T A SCANNER AN INTEGRATED PART OF MY ‘MOBILE OFFICE’ LAPTOP?
I try but usually fail to do the GTD or Getting Things Done routine. One strike against me is that I have a very mobile lifestyle, including two offices, a lab in another building, and finally lots of travel (not to mention my messy home.) Inboxes work, but it’s hard to geographically distribute them when they involve paper.
When I need to take action on a piece of paper, that paper usually goes away in some fashion–a memo gets read and recycled, a form gets returned, or it’s judged to be irrelevant and ‘deleted’ (i.e., recycled.) These things are not place dependent.
However, the one that always gets me is things that I’m required to hold onto but which don’t require immediate action. Worse still if they get deposited in my life somewhere other than an inbox. When I get stuff that needs filing in one of my offices, I’ll routinely send it to myself via interdepartmental mail to get to the office where it deserves to be filed in a cabinet (although the likelihood of this happening is lower than I like, leading to piles of ‘to file.’ Luckily these clutter but don’t disorganize me–I can safely ignore them almost all the time.)
Receipts are the worst. They accrue all over the place, I diligently try to make sure they end up in their ultimate destination (in some cases sticking them in postal mail to the campus to get them out of my hair while traveling). But what I really want is to go paperless. I need receipt scanning. Paper is heavy, and little pieces of paper are prone to loss. I got in BIG trouble with accounting after one business trip where my usual system (receipts go in envelope or folder, which goes in the outer sleep of laptop bag) was tripped up–a flight attendant moved my bag in the overhead to be handle first rather than butt-end first, meaning it was pointing slightly downslope. The entire mess of receipts fell out of the folder into the nether regions of the overhead bin, and I myself had no way of knowing until I took said folder out and found it empty. Accounting actually wanted me to prove that I had contacted the airlines to ask them to look for my slips of paper on the plane in the back of the overhead bin. Of course the airline refused.
The problem with this is that all the little receipt scanners out there are really designed for desktop, not laptop, usage. Yeah, I know, wand scanners and smallish USB scanners exist, but they require extra crap in my bag and they are mostly redundant with what I have.
If you look at what’s built into the latest MacBooks, you get a camera. Videoconferencing is apparently more important to my mobile work than scanning, in the designer’s eye. And yet I see these lovely svelte, flat scanners like the HP ScanJet 4670 (now discontinued) where most of the product is providing a skeleton with which to hold the paper and a little machinery, and I think, I’ve got a folding device almost that big, with power, and a light source, and a camera, why can’t my laptop scan?
There are some fun workarounds to scanning, I love for instance the barcode scanners that just use a webcam like delicious library. Could some dedicated deskewing software and a notch in the hinge allow me to place a piece of paper on my keyboard, angle the camera downwards, and photograph these pesky receipts, then pitch them forever? If the hotels didn’t charge an arm and a leg for faxing, I’d just efax this stuff to myself, but honestly the laptop is my mobile office, why can’t I do it with that? For that matter, why couldn’t the camera in a MacBook be used for faxing too while we’re at it?