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Comment by techgipper | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I do this with my digital trash can:

When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away the lower documents in it, since from the fact that he hadn’t fished them out, he figured he’d probably never miss them if they were thrown away permanently.

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I do this but don't throw the documents away. Instead I put the "buffer" into longer term storage (read: jammed into a box in my shed that can at least be searched even if it takes ages).

It turns out that, for me, there are quite a lot of things you suddenly need a year or more later that felt unimportant at the time.. insurance documents, warranties, car related documents that are useful when selling the car, documents relating to house improvements. These should probably be filed better on day one, but this is life :-D

I started following this same system, and after realizing how much sense it made, and how similar this system is to typical digital data storage system design, I concluded I should always design physical storage systems using the same mindset as data storage.

Scan, OCR and shred. I have a scan pile and a shred pile. I collect documents in front of my scanner. Once a month I'll shred the previous month's documents in the shred pile, scan the current documents, and put them in the shred pile to be shredded next month.

I do this because sometimes it's easier just having the hard-copy around, but if I haven't used it in a month, it's rare I still need the hard-copy.

Do you name them, or just put them en masse by date? And what ocr software do you use?

Cloud vendors have OCR built in now, Amazon announced a newer product at Ignite called Textract and the Rekognition service has some capabilities there. GCP Vision and Azure have options as well. Getting the mass scan/photo is the annoying part. Some scanners also have OCR built in, or you can look at pytesseract.

I do something similar. I scan to pdf then store those in Evernote and Evernote does the OCR.

Initially they are just named with the date they are scanned. Once a quarter or so I'll organize the ones I care about and the rest stay in an "unorganized" folder.

I use DEVONthink Pro Office which embeds Abbyy for OCR, along with a Fuji SnapScan.

I use JS1’s exact process, software and hardware. That is just too eerie. I however only shred once I have a full banker’s box, which I take to a commercial shredder for a big toss for $100, once or twice a year.

Why a commercial shredder rather than a $100 crosscut (Amazon Basics makes some pretty good ones)? I actually find the shredder pretty fun to use.

Most inexpensive shredders have a very low duty cycle, so they'll cut out or overheat if you shred continuously for more than a couple of minutes. That's fine if you shred a couple of documents at a time, but it's infuriating if you have a big box of documents that need to be shredded. Heavy-duty shredders capable of continuous use are bulky and heavy, which is a significant issue if you live in a small apartment.

just burn em in a trashcan

I use a cylinder of wire mesh on something heatproof, in the garden.

Better than a cheap shredder by miles, and some nice heat that makes it pleasant in wintertime. :)

Domestic burning of household waste is illegal where I live, I would have thought it would be illegal most places in the Western world by now. Burn paper = CO2; shred paper = more paper.

Ah makes sense. I guess I just do it as I need to, since I don’t do the document buffering thing.

Or a fireplace...

Even more fun is supervising a young child doing the shredding :)

It takes many hours to shred and not worth my time. I have a shredder for the rare cases I need something shredded NOW.

Staples will shred for a $1 a pound, and a banker’s box is at most 30lbs.

Staples does, but indirectly. Your stuff goes into a lock box. Does it get shredded? No idea.

> These should probably be filed better on day one

Maybe, maybe not! I've optimized aggressively for writes (common) over reads (rare) - I don't want to even waste time deciding if I can throw something away or not, so I also keep everything that isn't super obviously recyclable immediately (mass mail, autopaid bills for less 'important' things like internet/utilities, most receipts since I don't itemize my deductions, etc.)

Anything sent to me goes into either a yearly "keep long term" (10+ years - tax docs, house/car stuff, etc.) or yearly "keep short term" (2+ years - insurance receipts etc.) folder in a filing cabinet where it can be forgotten about. Even that's over-complicated IMO - I haven't gotten rid of any folders from either category. If I need my hard copy of something, I probably need it for a specific year anyways. Sorting into more categories doesn't help much - I'd still have to remember which category my 401k documents went in (tax documents? did I have a financial folder? was my system still the same in 2012?)

Hand written notes are slightly more complicated - I actually read my notes enough to optimize reads a little by scanning them in to save me the hassle of opening up my filing cabinet. Still extremely streamlined - I symlinked the default location to a single dumping folder where I actually want them (I:\home\scans\) without needing to select anything. I keep the default sequential numbering naming scheme. I got a sheet fed scanner so I don't have to keep lifting the lid of a bed scanner. I setup a shortcut on the scanner so I press the scanner touchscreen twice ("Shortcuts", "Scan to File"), and a file appears. I don't bother with OCR - my handwriting is terrible, a computer probably can't read it, I probably can't read it.

Car documents - glovebox. I don’t even attempt to organize them anymore. Buy oil to do a change myself? Put receipt directly in glovebox, writing mileage and date on it if I am diligent. Occasionally I’ll throw away the old insurance / registration papers in the stack.

I pretty much do this daily for everything. If I don’t interact with it in a year, it’s fine to throw away next house cleaning. So if I walk by, it goes out. Often “going out” means sold on Craigs list or eBay, but still.

I kind of force myself to do it, because deep down I think we are all pack rats. It’s in our nature to want to keep things “just in case”, but we live in a world where we can get anything with a few clicks. So why?

> It’s in our nature to want to keep things “just in case”, but we live in a world where we can get anything with a few clicks. So why?

Um, money?

Environment?

I mostly buy and resell so I actually don’t spend much at all on items. I lose from the depreciation, but not too bad actually.

I'd have thought the shipping (on eBay) and time would cost more than the depreciation.

If I had a 50's secretary to do all my fleabaying, I too would do this, sheesh.

People do that with their deleted items in outlook.

helpdesk empties deleted items

Hey! I keep stuff in there!

I do that with tabs for online articles I (probably) want to read.

You should use Pocket for that: getpocket.com

I prefer using tabs because the space constraint forces you to actually choose what's important to read. When there is no space constraint everything just gets dumped into a pile and there's no real way to prioritize what you truly do and don't want to read. You just end up with a long list of stuff you don't care enough to actually read.

At least that was my experience with Pocket. Maybe it works for some. I do the same thing with physical books. I don't keep a list of books to read. I keep a bookshelf full of stuff I'm making my way through over the years. Spending the money forces me to choose what I actually feel is important I read vs what I think I want to read.

Y'all love tabs too? Let me blow your minds real quick if you haven't seen these:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-styl... (tl;dr view tabs on the left with some visual hierarchy to indicate what came from where)

and

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo... (TL;DR click the button when you can't see the favicons anymore because you have so many open. It'll save them to a single page that includes all the previous tabs you've saved so you can cmd+f it if you REALLY want to find That One Thing You Had Open That One Time)

If you use that many tabs then you're better off using FireFox with the Tree Style Tabs extension [1]. Unlike the Chrome extension, it integrates properly with the browser window and you can hide the original tab strip.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Nothing ensures I'll never see it again more than bookmarking it and closing the tab in hopes that I'll one day read it. Out of sight, out of mind.

Accumulating tabs works for me. I always end up working back through them because they are so visible.

Pocket gets worse the more you use it: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...

Tabs save the history of the tab as well. This is a great resource. And it's saved in session files when you save.

I have a tab opened in October 2016 that I still didn't read yet.

I'd claim to do the same, but I never really close the tabs, I'll just fire up a new window, and maybe come back to the old window mañana.

I had previously tried setting up some sort of Apple Script or folder action to do this in macOS for someone. The other day I noticed they added a, "Remove items from the Trash after 30 days" in macOS Sierra.

I do something similar and thought it was a cool reference to find another does it as well.

I don’t throw the second pail away and just put it in a storage bin, forever (so far). About once a year, I fish out a document. To me, it seems cheaper than the time I spent trying to think about how to sort or keep stuff.

I call this putting my garbage in (reverse) quarantine.

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