My struggle doing adult things
So I’ve been a working adult since I graduated from University a few years back. One of the adult things that I have to deal with, as with many of us, are bills; and lots of them.
Those who knows me, know that I’m terrible at organization. My shit’s are everywhere and my biggest nightmare of all, handling papers.
That is a piece of paper I did not purposely crush for this blog. To be fair to myself, it wasn’t anything important so I just chucked it somewhere I can find space for it. I know I know, I’m lazy and bad at keeping my stuff neat and tidy.
Fortunately, I did learn a productivity/tool/technique/lifehack: Going Paperless. What’s that you say? Stick I show you through demostration.
So today I am going through a whole bunch of letters.
Argh, okay now with most of my letters, presumably yours too, I don’t really need most of the dead trees for official purposes. What I do need are just the important stuff, i.e. bill amount, premiums due etc. I wish there’s a way for me to Cmd+f (Ctrl+f for you windows users) those details then I don’t have to flip and read through all these crazy details.
Okay easy you say, just whip out your favorite note taking apps and start typing away the important details of your letters! Save that shit and you can refer to it later. Well it most cases that would fit the bill (pun intended) just fine. However there are cases where you do need the information that you didn’t capture from the letter. Or maybe you want to share that awesome insurance plan you just signed with your cousin? The details covering in the letter would just be too much for you to typing it all out. Solution? If you’ve read that link above, you’ll know OCR.
Optical Character Recognition
This is a technology that used to be accessible to big corporates with a ridiculous budget to spend on improving productivity in their daily processing. What it essentially does is converting images of words and characters and make them searchable text in your doc, pdf files. Super cool stuff. Now in the 21st century, you can have access to same technology with a much lesser expense.
My tool, the scanner
This scanner was a second-hand acquisition of Carousell. It just looks like a regular portable (powered by USB) scanner but the real kicker is with it’s software. The ScanSnap Manager scans your bills and letters into a pdf file which after, you could choose to have it converted into doc or xls format. How it does that is through the OCR technology.
Scanning, scanning…..
Ready to get your mindblown
You think you’re done with just scanning your letters, being able to Cmd+f through your shit? Oh it’s not over. There’s one more trick and trust me you’re gonna love this.
After scanning the documents, you’ll be given this window:
We’re gonna scan and put our documents up into Google Drive. Oh yeah~.
We could choose “Scan to Google Drive”, but I have Google Drive install on my PC here, so I’m gonna just choose the regular O’ “Scan to Folder”.
Once this is saved into my Google Drive folder, it will be uploaded into the cloud. By now, you should know what this entails. My document is now officially accessible on my PC, Mac, phones through Google Drive. Furthermore thanks to Google ridiculous search capabilities,I can search for my documents, not just by it’s title, but with whatever text could that was OCR’d in.
Have you gone
The paper?
Do whatever you want with it. Chuck it. Shred it? Store it? Doesn’t matter now since you can print it out anytime you want. Till next time Smart Nation.
aikchunwrites 