Noodling around the house

[hrj]

Emptied another file drawer. The "get rid of all but one filing cabinet" project is going forward no matter what happens on the real estate front. It's fascinating to contemplate the half-life of "important papers". Eventually, everything becomes obsolete and irrelevant. It's comforting, in a way, that decisions that may seem nerve-wracking today may be crystal clear in five years. There will be no more linguistics undergrads popping up in my in-box asking me to dig through my memory of their classwork in order to provide a recommendation letter. The receipts and presentation handouts from the conference in Paris are long since irrelevant. And, as previously noted, there's no point at all in saving the hard-copy printouts of my dissertation data when I have the original computer files. (Although it occasionally reminds me that I should at least leave the world the legacy of the tidied up database of Medieval Welsh preposition data.) On the other hand, I found some things stuffed into the file folders that had no business being treated as old reference materials (e.g., the commercial pattern for the Boksten Man's clothing that I bought back in '99 in Denmark). This is why I actually look through the files before tossing them in recycling.

My excessively-over-engineered integrated financial tracking database has passed its next test: rolling over to the new year. There are certain features built into the files that assume each year's data will get archived out of the working file. Well, ok, one is a feature and one is a bug. The cumulative budgeting figures (i.e., whether I'm on-target for the categories with a specific budgeted amount) work off a "total in-category divided by day-of-year" so there's an awkward period between the start of the new year and the point when the old data gets archived when a year-plus's expenses get divided by just the "plus" number of days. The bug is that some of the internal complexity of the files makes navigation start to get r---e-----a-----l-------l---------y slow as more and more records are added. For most data entry it doesn't cause problems, but when I want to review the running balance for one of the sub-accounts, I'd better have a solitaire game handy.

I haven't done the full end-of-year financial analysis yet, but I'm delighted to find that I stayed under all but one of my tracked budget categories. (The one I missed on was "office supplies". Not sure if I would have been on-target if I hadn't had to buy a new laptop. Also, I was on-target for "food" only if you combine the sub-categores "groceries" and "prepared food". I went under on the former and over on the latter, but only by small amounts.) Since the budget tracking is something I use as a reference reality-check, rather than having unbreakable set-asides, this means that I've internalized my budget targets sufficiently.

And I believe I have all the paperwork and data necessary to do my taxes! So that's a project for tomorrow.

Comments

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

You should try to sort out the papers for 50 years of record keeping! I have managed now to toss my student records, sorted out the pet's medical records and discarded those of pets long past, and am trying to work on my pictures of my children! I want to digitize them, and find that it's an enormous job. Memories get in the way! I wonder if I'll get it done before I die?

[cellio]

We have found the investment in a bulk scanner to be liberating when it comes to the piles of probably-irrelevant paper. If we ever actually do need to find something, I'm betting that searching the PDFs won't be harder than searching for the right piece of physical paper.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

For the last year I've been scanning all my bills, receipts, statements, etc. as I process them, and it's definitely made life easier when I needed to lay hands on some particular piece of information. (Although the time when I needed to provide copies of paperwork to someone, they could only receive it as a fax -- so I had to print it out and then fax the hardcopy. *sigh*)

Scanning all my article offprints will make things much easier to find when I want them. Currently I have to remember which subfolder of which folder in which drawer to look in. The scanned copies are all indexed in my pre-existing bibliography spreadsheet, so I can search on any piece of the citation (or filter on my topic structure) and it'll give me the name of the pdf file. It'll also make life easier when people inquire about copies.

I'm finally getting the hand of how to use my Scan Snap scanner efficiently. What with things being stapled or paperclipped and dogeared and generally "difficult" I can't just plunk down a stack of pages into the sheet feeder. But if I feed the pages into the sheet-feeder one at a time as it's processing, it's still a lot faster than the older place-on-the-glass method. (The scanner also doesn't mind if I get several pages ahead -- the important part is to have clearly separated them before stacking them up in queue.)