My Storage Locker

During my first year of graduate school I gained access to a locker in the urban planning building, which was a big help. I was living 7 miles from campus in the Cully neighborhood and commuting downtown by bike or bus, so it was fabulous to not have to schlep everything every day.

This week as I wrapped up my coursework, my FINAL final project was to clean out my locker. When I did, I discovered that over time I’d collected quite a bit of stuff. I also realized I wasn’t counting these items in My 200 Things Challenge. So I'm writing all about it to clear my conscience.

My locker became a repository for things that I used when I was on campus (textbooks, snacks, my chalk bag for trips to the climbing wall, etc.) But I had a bad habit of stashing stuff here that I intended to send to someone but never seemed to find the time to actually pop in the mail.

I was also startled to discover how much paperwork I'd collected over the past two years. My new year's resolution was to go paper free so I began Strategizing Digitizing. All my paperwork went into a file in my locker to be scanned (at some later date, of course, when I had time.) By the time I looked at that daunting stack of paperwork I decided I can't possibly need it all. I spent an hour Getting all My Docs in a Row and narrowed it down to just a small collection of documents that I really need. I’ll be scanning documents in the next couple days while I still have access to a high speed scanner.

In the end, there were just a few items to take home. A box of envelopes. My gym gear. Some uneaten snacks. And a gift (from last year!) that I need to mail (not pictured because that would ruin the surprise!) as soon as my sister Heidi sends me her mailing address (nudge, nudge!)

Getting All My Docs in a Row

As I explained in Strategizing Digitizing, my New Year's Resolution is to go paperless. After conducting my New Year's Re-Inventory yesterday and realizing that I'm over on My 200 Things Challenge I decided to get to work. I was a little horrified when I took inventory today and realized I had The Only Existing Copy of various electronic files stored in the following places:

• my laptop computer,
• my personal drive at school,
• two different USB keys,
• my back up hard drive,
• Google docs,
• Dropbox, and
• a small collection of CD-Rs.

I used to have documents on floppy disks and a zip drive, too, but I tossed those years ago when I couldn’t find a computer which still accepted them. It was definitely time to consolidate! It doesn't make sense for a minimalist to have this many Little Pieces of Important Paper.

I haven’t yet added the documents from my personal drive at school, but I started with the documents that were handy. I dumped everything from my USB keys, back-up hard drive, and CDs onto my laptop. This involved borrowing an external CD drive since my MacBook Air doesn’t have a CD drive. (Note to self: when your computer has evolved beyond a storage technology, it’s time to catch up with it!)

I’d used various organizing schemes over the years so it took a little while to get everything sorted into a new filing system, but eventually I got there. I was surprised by how much I could archive. I do still feel compelled to keep much of it, but it’s not relevant to my daily life, so I don’t need it available there at a glance in the left-hand sidebar. It’s now nicely organized within my Archive folder and I can still get to it quickly if necessary. The folders I do seem to use on a regular basis are these:

• Archives
• Journal
• Little Life
• Recipes
• Tiny Houses
• a folder for each of my classes (which I add to the archive at the end of the term)

I’m still Strategizing Digitizing. Scanners are notoriously unreliable. Working with them has often given me more headaches than it’s worth. A friend of mine has a scanner he loves and he offered to loan it to me. So I took it home and messed around with scanner drivers for a while, but I never could get it to work for me. I looked into buying the brand and model he swears by, but I’m not in a place to spend upwards of $300 on a scanner right now. I considered buying a used scanner off Craigslist, but I couldn’t find one that would scan both sides of the page and I don’t have the patience to feed pages through. I think it would take me a week to scan all my documents and if it’s that cumbersome I’ll quickly abandon the habit. Anyone out there have a digitizing strategy they’d recommend?

Strategizing Digitizing

My New Year’s resolution is to go digital so I’m getting ready for it. I tend to be one of those uber organized people who keeps important paperwork all categorized and in one place. On (approximately) a monthly basis I sort new paperwork I’ve acquired, file the important documents, and recycle everything that’s not compostable and then shred and compost everything I can. I began acquiring important paperwork as a teenager, so for the past fifteen years, every time I’ve moved, I’ve hauled around a Tupperware tote of paperwork. Over time I replaced it with larger and larger totes. Eventually I added a second one. I’m now the not-so-proud owner of three large totes of paperwork. As this post from Life Edited explains, even for us minimalists, it’s hard to downsize those Little Pieces of Important Paper. They might actually be… important!

But they don’t need to take up so much physical and mental space. I can certainly imagine how nice it would be to be paper-free. Wouldn’t it be convenient to have any document I need available just by doing a quick keyword search on my computer? Wouldn’t it be a relief to not have Little Pieces of Important Paper taking up physical space, time, and attention?

I hate that these totes are 3 of my 200 things. So I’ve made the decision to go all-digital. This will involve three big steps:

1)   First I’ll organize all the documents that are already in a digital format.

2)   Next I’ll begin digitizing any new documents that I acquire. I’ll get in the habit of scanning anything that’s important and shredding anything that’s not, so that they don’t pile up.

3)   Then I’ll scan my totes of paper documents so that I can eliminate Little Pieces of Important Paper from my life entirely.

Eventually, I’ll also scan old journals, too, so that I’m no longer lugging around that giant tub of paper and ink. This, I realize is a larger project and one that will involve some emotional energy as well as time. Speaking of which, I’ve set aside some time this week to tackle the first step by organizing my electronic files. You might call it Getting All My Docs in a Row.