I feel a great sense of relief this evening as I sit down to write this. After more than 18 months, my desk is finally clear. Paper had been piling up ever since I upgraded to MacOS Catalina or something like that. At that point, it seemed, my trusty Fujitsu ScanSnap 1300i that I’ve had for nearly 8 years now, stopped working with the OS. I ignored the problem for months, and then, when the pandemic began, I ignored it some more.
Yesterday, however, more out of desperation than anything else, I started searching for replacement scanners, only to discover that the compatibility problem had been resolved. I updated the ScanSnap manager for Big Sur and everything was working again!
That meant I actually had to scan in all of that paper. First, I sorted through it, separating it into stuff that wasn’t worth scanning, and stuff that was. I saw that Evernote had an update, and I updated Evernote, and then I began to scan. I still use the same process, more or less, that I have been using from the start. But I found that in the new Evernote, it took longer to update the meta-data in my notes. Updating the Create Date is tricker, because you can’t type in a date, but have to select from pull-down lists. Updating tags is more cumbersome than it used to be because you can’t just type them in but have to open a popup window first. Minor delays, but annoying, nonetheless.
I got through half of the paper yesterday, shredded that half, and the proceeded to tackle the second half today. Finally, at 5:01 pm Eastern Standard Time, all of the accumulated paper had been scanned, and shredded. My desk was clear, and a great sense of relief washed over me. I can now move onto the other things that I want to work on and check this item off my list. Checking things off lists also provides me with a great sense of relief.
Coincidentally, it was the second time a great sense of relief washed over me today. The first came just after Joe Biden was sworn in as President of the United States around noon today.
RSS - Posts
I was amused.
Not sure if Michael A was amused by your paper clean up or the swearing in of our new president. Me, I’m proud of you and happy we have a new president.
I feel your pain with the updates to Evernote. Everything seems just a tiny bit harder than it was before. I’m sure that a lot of it is just muscle memory, but I wish I could have the old native client back.
Congrats on the empty desk!
You and I use a lot of the same tools. I’m glad you point out the scanner issue. I haven’t upgraded the machine I scan into in years (there is some firmware problem preventing me from moving this 2012 mac pro into the current era, and I just haven’t had a need to mess with it) Good tip though for when I do update it. I notice in another post you don’t use evernote. What do you use to hold your docs? I’ve been using evernote not as a note taking program, but as a doc store.
JR, actually, I use Evernote quite a bit, and have for many years now. I just don’t use it for note-taking. For that, I’ve recently been using Apple Notes.
Yeah I see that now. I got ahead of myself there. I’ve used Evernote as a doc store for many years, but agree it is not a platform to take notes on. I’m still using a rough bullet journal style in Leuchtturm1917 and I’ve started using RoamResearch to track projects and other GTD things I used to track in Evernote. I’m still figuring that out. I did adopt a large format pen and paper notebook, as I think you do as well, for more journaling like things.