Paper Diary Week Two

Day 6
Monday 2nd March

I’m sitting here staring at a PDF form that I am supposed to print out, fill in and sign. How on earth am I going to manage this??? I’ve attempted to copy and paste it into a word document but this just results in the formatting going mad and in no way solves how to sign it without printing it. I really can’t see a solution but it seems so early in my pledge to do this. I guess I shall just have to placate myself by thinking that if I had got the company to send me a hard copy it would be even worse, not only would there be the paper of the form its self but also two envelopes. With luck, they might take a scanned version of this form which would mean only using one sheet of paper and no envelope at all.

Day 7
Tuesday 3rd March

The post keeps coming in. Why is it some companies seem to spew out an endless amount of material. We are a Mac based office, we have never allowed a PC to darken our doors, yet I find myself on the Dell mailing list . How do you unsubscribe from the torrents of post that they and others send? It seems to be a lot harder than unsubscribing from an email list and infinitely more annoying, imagine the cost to the environment of all this unsolicited paper being sent out everyday.


Day 9
Thursday 5th March

I’ve signed up to the free trial of a programme called ‘Receipt Wallet’ and have been really enjoying playing with it this afternoon. The general gist of it is that you can scan receipts and invoices and also import others as PDF files, this should eliminate any need to print them. You then add information to each of the scanned documents such as the date, how much the invoice is for and what tax is due on it. The programme then files it for you. It’s just a very clever very straight forward way of ordering your receipts and should make the book keepers job a lot easier. The one disadvantage so far is that it doesn’t recognise word files or web archives so it can be a bit of a pain converting everything to PDF or… even worse for my PayPal receipts copying and pasting them into word and then converting to a PDF. I have to say though you do feel ultra organised when you can see each receipt in it’s place with all the information relevant easy to access. I was worried that once I had scanned the files they would be in some weird format that I wouldn’t be able to get at after the trial had ended but to my delight, they were all there in a nice folder partitioned by date. Surprisingly, to me at least, the software only costs 40 dollars so I am tempted to make the investment. I’ve another 15 days to think about it though.

Other than that it’s been quite uneventful, my desk still looks lovely and neat although a coffee pot, a mug and a digital camera are strewn across it now, it seems I have a need to clutter up the space one way or another. I also seem to have put the ‘In tray’ on the long finger as well as inputting info from the index cards… I guess I’ll just have to save them for another day that seems to be unremarkable in a paper sort of way.

Day 10
Friday 6th March
No post today so I managed a completely paper free day in every way. Tomorrow I am attending BizCamp Dublin, I have downloaded the schedule onto my iPod so I can avoid having to pick up a paper one when I arrive. I’m hoping that the slow typing speed on the iPod will be just quick enough to make good notes during the day.