Someone said, ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’. That’s my life. But my life is also photocopying years’ old piles of napkins and post-its at staples, so I can scan them in, or pulling out less portable but dirt cheap notebooks, like the bound composition books that go for a dollar or less, ripping pages out, and scanning those. Those are great for studying Greek. They’re great for pursuing a subject. Not for what I need them for right now. Filofax (or Daytimer)? I switched off of that when I became so online with my business and writing that my google calendar is my daily friend. My office is my home, and I work in the virtual world, so I’m not carrying my Filofax to meetings anymore. I’d rather carry a netbook, and use many different kinds of online documents for work – calendar, docs, spreadsheets, e-mail, etc. And then there’s social media. A filofax isn’t social – it doesn’t collaborate. You have to offload it into something else to do that.

When I look at a moleskine, the miser in me says ‘too expensive, decadent, not sustainable’. But then I haven’t looked for knock offs. The moleskine is flexible in its cover. That’s huge. You get a kind of subtle portability off of a soft, flexible cover that doesn’t come from a hardback lined blank book, which is cheaper. The ribbon marker is hugely important. You might think it wouldn’t be, but it just is. The size is crazy important. The smallest bit too big, and it’s not going with you just when you need it. The smallest bit too small, and you won’t use it. Moleskine size variations are wonderful. It’s not that you might not find a blackberry useful, for instance, but it’s not useful for every kind of writing activity. The moleskine is very netbook like, as a paper object. It says ‘write in me’, not ‘play games on me, set me to vibrate, play with me on a subway’. Also, I could throw 10 moleskines into a manila envelope if I needed to move them – a moleskine doesn’t beg to be offloaded/scanned – it’s made to keep a record of your thoughts in between its covers and nowhere else. The kind of thoughts that either become something else in a different venue (like a book or blog) or aren’t meant to be shared – only used.

And if it’s used for what it’s designed for, it won’t be offloaded in that way. It’s designed for hashing up ideas that will take a different form elsewhere – at least that’s my take on it. You write out that bit of insight that must go into a book, but it’s not the book. So you don’t have to rip out the pages, and it’s actually kind of nice to think you could go back to your notes somewhere, and peruse or research them. Because it’s not a napkin or back of a business card or sheet of paper in my leather covered folio lined pad cover, it doesn’t pressure you to do something with it immediately, or threaten to pile up and become a fortress you have to demolish. It never becomes clutter – and filling it doesn’t make it an idea brick – something that you never really revisit that just takes up space in a file cabinet.

A moleskine says fill me, I can save these ideas for you as long as you like. I’ll be here. You might even enjoy flipping through me and reading me, even before you’re ready to use some of them. It’s OK, you can open up. Tell me. I’m a moleskine.

So I’m looking at this as a piece of technology, and I want it. B&N has them when I walk into the store, which is where I’m absorbing this out of the corner of my eye, not looking directly at them. But I need what they can do, and don’t have an alternative. I need a place to form ideas – ideas that won’t form unless I’m writing them in order to form them. It’s not a diary or a journal – it’s an idea clarifier and extractor.

Thing is – no matter how much you wish it, you just don’t always have an electronic device, and an idea won’t always come to you when you can use the device, and the idea won’t always stick around while you turn on and log in to the device, or while you’re fiddling with it. And then, importanly, where is the idea? It’s a file among many files, it might sit as an attachment among e-mails about your vacation or your dog or your day at the office. It doesn’t have a context that gives it the life of an idea. It needs to sit among other ideas in an idea context. It needs to live in a place that you visit to get your ideas back, review think, think about them and have more, and not just become a digitized, numbered file.

There’s something else. Nothing reads like a paper book. When I want to cram a bucket load of knowledge into me, I don’t want to use PDFs. I don’t want to scroll. There’s something about the rapidity and flexibility with which you can scan a physical page, and flip back and forth, mark something, etc. that no device, no device, can match. There’s something that tactile touch against the edges of paper won’t approach until someone loads up a truly leather-like flexible netbook-like cover with 250 individual e-paper pages (until the monitor is a series of paper thin physical windows), and gives you a stylus, and adds a ribbon marker. There’s something about the tactile communication with a book that can’t be improved upon, I think, or won’t be for a very long time. And this is coming from someone who loves his e-books, has an e-book reader (Nook), uses a netbook, and likes technology.

In the same way, for writing, for getting down an idea extremely fast, stream of consciousness, even a tablet and stylus can’t match paper of exactly the right size, width, situated in relation with other paper in a cover. Again – a moleskine. Handwriting recognition is really cool, but no matter how fast it gets, it’s not the same. Even with virtual lines on the virtual page, texture and tactile relationships to paper are so innately human, so grounded in the physical universe, that I think it’s safe to say that some ideas beg to be let onto paper, to dance at the end of a flowing, liquid, ink-pen, to receive pressure as part of their mental construction, so that the flow out of the ink actually helps shape the idea, to receive tactile inflection – gesture, before they’ll allow themselves to be dressed up for the digitized ball. I think that even the act of holding a pen in hand changes and contributes to the type and character and subtle dimensions of thoughts we have, in a way that’s perhaps not better than, but certainly different than hovering over a keyboard. I think one way with touching my chin and cheek in a thinker’s gesture, and another way when I’m typing – I just do – the inflection is different enough to change what I’ll say and how I’ll say it. I point this out as someone with a militantly paperless office who sees his computers as an extension of himself. Moleskine.

I’m looking at [alternatives] now to see if anything is more affordable, but if I have to get them off amazon.com at $10/each, that’s what I’ll do. A bundle of 5 will last a while. Alternatives would have to meet the subtle criteria for integrity (internal consistency), aesthetic feng shui, and the elements of tactile genius that make up a moleskine. Someone with a sense of what I’m talking about will have to have made them, or else just done a good job of copying. But I see genuine moleskines in my future, too. There’s no substitute for being able to grab another one of the shelf and keep going.

Actually, the original way that most of us tech types did it was to leave the PC running 24/7. In the old days, you put more wear and tear on the hard drive (which was then considered the central part of the machine – now it’s the cloud – the internet itself) – more wear and tear by starting up than by leaving it running.

I got my electric bill last month and while the main PC contributes only a bit to it, it’s enough to notice the nights I left it running. Why the heck aren’t you using standby or hibernate, you ask? Exactly. I could kick myself for all the months I didn’t. But I’ve started up again and now I’m using both.

Standby just puts it in low power mode. It *seems* shut down, but it’s really using just enough juice to keep your place. I launches faster when you come back in the morning, but if you have a power loss, you may be in bad shape. Hibernate stores everything the way it is (I would still advise saving any office documents that might be open – you can leave them up – just hit save, in case there’s a problem). It comes up a little slower, but a power outage may not lose your work.

If it’s just browser tabs, standby works. After all, good browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome will know if you have shutdown improperly and offer to bring the tabs back or, in Google’s case, just do it. Google is smarter than Firefox currently. You can set it to *always* bring back the last tabs that were up. Neither browser does one thing that would help a lot, though – allow you to hit a button and save current tabs for next boot. You’d think, but none of them do that, yet. You can bookmark all tabs to open at once, but then your bookmarks get cluttered up with temporary work.

So, in my office now, hibernate or standby are the rule, not shutting down, and not leaving it running. What are your green productivity ideas? Comment on this post.

If you *are* storing your bookmark in your browser, like I used to do, what happens when your operating system or your hard drive crashes? There are services, but one of those services is google itself. Install google toolbar, and start using the built-in google bookmarks button to store your favorites. One of the nice things is the ability to bookmark all your tabs at once under a category. Besides, bookmarks are hardly ever revisited without better organizaton.

I’ve been finding google bookmarks a bit slow to respond these days, though. Can’t tell if it’s google, firefox, some plugin, or all of the above, but I want to save and close, not save and wait. I need faster bookmarking. And bookmark management is just as important. Without bookmark management, I might as well be storing it in notepad. As much as I love google bookmarks, it’s got functioning management, but nothing stellar or very convenient, even if navigation is lightening fast.

I’m a member of quite a lot of social bookmark sites. I won’t do delicious for personal use, because it’s a yahoo property now. Furl is gone, though they’ve been replaced by Diigo which is pretty cool for social bookmarking for other reasons. I’ve got their plugin installed. So I went on the hunt for something to replace my google bookmarks, as a primary bookmarker, until they get it prioritized higher. Besides, while delicious is the obvious choice for some people, it doesn’t have the organization features I need – it sacrifices those in favor of the social aspects. So here’s what I found that would work:

Spurl: Survives where Furl didn’t. And Spurl has some pretty nifty features. It stores a cache of the page, much like google. And it’s got those nice social sharing features, plus a clean, fast, stellar interface. It’s the organization tools that make it worthwhile, though.

Blinklist: Mostly about the interface and organizational tools. The list organization vs. folder/category is not for me. I like it in e-mail, but in bookmarks I want my folders. For one thing, I bookmark sites as action items. I need to have folders for better organization. But the interface has got some nice customization features to it, and they’re fast.

Gmarks: This is my new tool. Like all social bookmark sites, its both a browser plugin and a web site, but the site in this case is actually google bookmarks. It lets me keep google bookmarks ,but gives me very fast linking, great organization and great management features in a sidebar. With a Gmarks browser plugin, google bookmarks is redeemed, and is now my confirmed bookmarks manager. I commend it to you highly.

That said, I’m keeping an eye on the other two. I think they’re better than delicious by far, for real bookmarkers, so check them out if you just don’t want to use the google stuff. Oh, and bookmark Rules of Work while you’re at it.

Opinion: I’m thinking about  engaging in conservation of links, by leaving out links to sites when we already provide the name. Everyone’s got google now, so just typing any one of these in your browser bar or google search bar will bring up the site for you. Links to everything are just, I’m beginning to think, old fashioned. Besides, you don’t know if they’re going to open in a new window or not at a lot of sites, unless you go to the trouble of right clicking and all that. Time will tell, but I’m interested in your opinion on this. Besides, too many outbound links give away search engine juice, in case you didn’t know.

Ashampoo Winoptimizer: This is the Swiss army knife of system cleaners. Great value, and they frequently offer this for $10 if you watch for it, though it’s worth the original price of $50. Try a free demo – you won’t be disappointed. Advice: don’t get crazy with all the tweaks this thing will allow. They’re good if you understand what you’re doing. If not, use it to clean, clean, and clean. The best thing they ever did in these later versions is include a “one-click optimizer”. I keep it on my taskbar. If I think I’ve lost any speed, I click it once, and keep working. By the way, it’s fast!

PC Onpoint: This is a single-function utility and it does it singly well. It cleans the registry. It has always seemed rock solid, high-end, professional (what some of us might tongue-in-cheek refer to as “corporate grade” – except, honestly, have more respect for it than that – this is good technology!).  It seems a little slower than Winoptimizer, but just a hair – a hair mind you – more thorough. Also, it has no tweak panels for you to hose your settings if you get click happy and aren’t geek savvy. My experience isn’t with the latest version, perhaps, but these comments were true as of a year ago.

Advanced System Care Free: This is a full-featured cleaner/optimizer that is also dead simple, once  you get the interface. Follow the ‘bouncing ball’ around the dial, so to speak, and it more or less takes care of everything for you, without you having to know any terminology. I have this installed on a family member’s PC. As a single, comprehensive, cleaning solution – especially since there’s a free version – it’s quite impressive.

Incidentally, I’m not intentionally excluding any other tools. I’ve tried a lot of them. But frankly, these in particular have been the most thorough, without causing damage to anything of mine, that I’ve experienced. In my experience, they’re the best.

That’s it. This is not primarily a blog about business tools, but when I find tools I like, I relay the information because what this blog is actually about is caring about your work. A friend and I looked at each other one day when lamenting a horrendous software choice on the part of a corporation and said, “in our own businesses, we won’t do things like this”. It isn’t just because we have a doctrine of technology. We do, but that’s beside the point. It’s because our work is a vehicle of meaning, as I can be accused of saying too often, and that means that we approach it, from a technological standpoint, differently than if our meaning came from some part at the expense of a whole – one project budget at the expense of a company, or whatever. So, if you’re using a PC – nothing wrong with a PC – remember, Microsoft didn’t invent them – they just dominated them for a long time, and that day is fast ending, then tools like these can help make using it more like driving a Mazda 3 or a Minicooper, and less like sputtering along in a Kia Sephia (ooo, mercy).

The real question is how many of you are going to go rogue and slip these onto your crawling, corporate workstation for a quickening test drive. Careful, Wilbur – there are eyes in them thar hills.

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve tried nearly all of them, and settled on Backblaze.

Jungle Drive: I found it impossible to set up. Too many separate logins and setting up the connection between the software and the storage servers, albeit rock solid amazon servers, threw several hurdles at me. After a couple of hours, including forum entries, I gave up. If it’s this much hassle, I won’t do it. I just know I won’t. It’s like exercising or writing your book – if there are too many hurdles between you and it, it’s not going to happen.

Mozy and Carbonite: Similar services, some differences, but I was concerned about key things, including impact on system resources and security. They both seem like reasonable solutions, and I like the right click and add to backup capability that one of them provides. I’ve no real objections to them, other than the cost of getting a backup DVD if you want one.

Others: A plethora of issues too numerous to detail. Many of them are specialized – more for sync than backup. I found some with great security, but price was often a barrier. A few had technical troubles in their install/setup/registration process that just sent me away as quickly as I’d found them.

Backblaze meets several criteria that are an absolute must:

Content: They don’t care what you’re backing up. No one’s going to tell you that you can’t backup an .avi that your recorded with your own camera. I don’t ever want to go “Oh yeah, that’s one of the file types Carbonite doesn’t accept.” I don’t have time for that. I need to know my data, what *I* consider to be my data, is safe, secure, and accessible and darned sure not stuck in an on-site world where fire, flood, and theft can wipe me out.

Security: Your personal security key is applied prior to the upload, so even Backblaze would find it difficult to read your files. This is deeply important. If you can’t secure your files, you can’t protect your files from one of the key things that backups are designed mitigate – theft. Sure, someone can break into your building and steal your computer, but short of that, if you’re password protecting everything, it’s mainly important that your backups be secured from scrutiny. Backblaze triumphs here.

Ease: Setup and implementation is absolutely a no-brainer. In this category, Backblaze is in a class all its own. And this is important. I’ve got geek skills, but I don’t want to use them to think about my backups. Backups need to be so automated that I don’t have to think about them at all – they just happen. If I do have to focus on them, then they won’t be done consistently, and they lose most of their value. Backblaze says ‘you drive – I’ll keep the car maintenanced’ – it’s the virtual butler of backups. Ask yourself – if you’re not doing regular backups, why not? Isn’t it because there’s something you have to do? I let Backblaze worry about that.

Trust: This applies to all cloud backup services. I do an occasional backup of all data to an external drive, so yeah I’m insulated somewhat from cloud catastrophe. But it’s a formality. The latest version of everything is in the cloud. Mostly what I’m backing up is older documents that weren’t created in the cloud in the first place. In the future, when all that’s converted over, I’ll download the cloud content as my backup activity. Future utilities will back up multiple cloud accounts to one server, and to your own portable drive. I think the data loss stories people have seen around cloud data are frankly overblown. Compare it to the data loss experienced daily in corporations and homes, despite local backup plans, and it’s nothing – a drop in the bucket. The trust issue is a non-issue.

Some other things I like are that Backblaze is cross-platform. So I can recommend it to others, regardless of platform. And I like that BB will backup external drives (other services still struggle here), that bandwidth use is easy to throttle up and down if I want more resources, and that the cost is $5/month. You just can’t beat it.

This post is destined to be a little ‘blah’, and that’s exactly the way I want it. The backup system on my rig needs to be brain-dead simple and require the least interference and input from me. I want it so boring that there’s nothing further to say, because I think that’s what makes a successful backup – for business, for personal data, or whatever. I think we’re at that point, thanks to BackBlaze.

Statistics schmatistics – supposedly, we’re first in class in technology in the workplace. But it doesn’t feel like it, does it? Not if you’re the least bit technically savvy. I’m not counting the people whose first experience with decent technology was in their company. I’m talking about if you’ve ever had say moderately good tech at home and compare that with the technology at use in the average US workplace. If you’ve experienced the slow PC purchased at 300% of  it’s street value, with some other corporation’s badge on it, plugged into a single monitor (how do these people do anything – once you’ve worked with two or three monitors, and have realized 300% increase in productivity, going to the average corporate office in the US is like a slap in the face – again, if the best tech you’ve known is at that office, I’m not counting you – you just don’t know) – and then to have productivity-draining software installed (from cripplingly-slow antivirus to ridiculously lame e-mail software – like Lotus Notes), and to have that pc plugged into a slow network, and then locked down with draconian security controls – blocking online productivity apps, tools and utilities, and even reasonably good e-mail – if you’ve experienced these things, you know that this – this sluggish, luddite, scared, ineffective and inefficient corporate version of being wired does not make anything number one. You go home, turn on the three monitors, boot a PC with enough RAM and other characteristics to fly into full throttle, and you know that the corporate US has got something terribly wrong. You work from home whenever you can, because frankly, you have better technology. If not, why not? You can build a box for $300 that beats the one on your desk in a corporate office. Of course, then you get on our speed-throttled US broadband environment, where ISPs charge you outrageous fees to lesson tinker toy limits on an unlimited-speed medium (fiber optic), and you’re dealing with the dichotomy: the corporate office is to your home computer what  your internet connection is to what a 12-year-old has in his bedroom on the technologically civilized side of the world.

These two disparities, though, may not be unconnected. In fact, contrary to what a Canadian professor claims puts the US on top, I venture to suggest that the barbarically mundane, prehistorically inefficient,  and backwater-slow level of technology we associate with our workplace and therefore with our work, in the US, is precisely why we remain in the virtual dark ages of broadband speed and penetration.  Two things are the driving force in our consciousness when it comes to technology – work and play – and frankly, it is work that usually pays the bills for us and for technology.

At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet. — [Wall Street Journal, November 15]

The Wall Street Journal ran the above article on November 15th asking the question “Why can’t we pick the technology we use in the office?” The article points out that instead of locking down the capability of installing software or using cloud-based software, virtual machines (which have been around since the mid 1960s, and incidentally are not only inexpensive but have often been provided by Microsoft for free), allow users to install whatever they want in a way that is hard-pressed to affect company security. You want to use a macbook or use your own graphics editor or paint program, you can. Virtual machines are like bringing your own hard drive, except it’s insulated from the rest of the environment. Better yet, if you hire people you can trust, let them bring their own hard drives. Most companies that don’t allow this, while officially banning USB thumb drives, would be hard pressed to find a manager’s desk or pocket that didn’t contain at least one. The WSJ journal cites ignorance and cost concerns during this economy as the barrier – but cost concerns should be driving the demand for more creative solutions to enhancing productivity, not less. In fact, I find it more likely that the barrier is psychological – the need for control, the parental attitude of the corporation itself – “we can’t “let” people do whatever they want or there will be chaos”. “Chaos” is the word corporations use to mean “too much freedom” – which makes the argument circular – ‘we can’t let people do whatever they want or there will be too much freedom’. The article laments the time lost waiting on bad search techology – like using windows to search a shared drive, or using Outlook – miniscule storage (I would say because one corporation that is not technically specialized thinks it’s safer to store it’s own data than partner with a company that is technically specialized to store it for less in unlimited space – after all, your corporation’s network has never gone down, has it?). Time to clean out your darned e-mail folders again. Add to this bad technology purchase decisions – not just in hardware but perhaps especially in software. Corporations are routinely buying fairly useless, anti-productivity (top-down design), and obsolete software – requiring not only retraining but further productivity loss to learn how to use the new productivity loss.

All good points. The cloud, of course, we’ve talked about before. You continually hear bird flu warnings about how a company lost it’s data in the cloud, and yes it’s possible. I wish someone would track all the companies that are losing data every day because they (mis)manage their own technology. The cloud isn’t just up and coming technology, it’s up and soaring. At the very least, all the naysayers should admit they’ve been using cloud technology for a long, long time – whether it’s aol, yahoo, or gmail for their mail. They just aren’t used to thinking about it for storing documents – and they should be, because the documents are far less likely to get lost into a searchless oblivion, get version-hosed or overwritten or wrongly moved or renamed, or be inaccessible just when you need them than cloud docs. The last corp I worked for sentenced us to Lotus Notes and the smart people hooked up a gmail account and simply set it to send mail from the web. Yeah, gmail is SSL, so it’s secure enough for prime time. Given all the hacking and viruses they’ve experienced on their internal mail network, it’s likely far more secure. Gmail not only automatically scans all attachments for viruses before they are opened, it does an unparalleled job of weeding out spam containing those attachments in the first place. Besides which, it has google as the search back-end, a state of the art filing system that makes folders obsolete, and virtually unlimited storage (because it keeps getting larger over time – by the time you use that much, you’ll have more room).

Regardless of the technological prescription one prefers, or even the political or economic one, what has to change is the prevalent attitude in the US about work itself. Those comfortable with the level of technology prevailing in offices are the equivalent of those comfortable with the level of productivity in the US automotive industry in the early 1980s (the K-car era). Increasing the level of technology at work won’t work. What will, the WSJ article correctly assessed, is providing a platform where people can contribute their own technology understanding and choices. The era of the all-knowing parental corporation must face up to the fact that it can’t blog to save it’s arse, can’t effectively handle e-mail, security, or searches (unless you’ve bought a Google server or are using Google Enterprise) better than AOL did a decade ago, and has grown accustomed to reinventing the wheel and then using it for purely ornamental purposes. It must let go – not entirely, but not a little – it must let go a whole lot. And it must favor technologies which favor letting go over management attitudes that don’t. It must, in fact, re-envision management models, team structures, and definitions of collaboration that enchance technological choice for the sake of productivity and for the very security and cost savings it has always referenced to justify it’s stranglehold on the electronic desktop. Corporations must redefine, as well, the workplace cubicle not int terms of the file cabinet, the telephone, and the pencil sharpener, but in terms of the wired and wireless desktop. It must, ultimately, like Jet Blue, go farther and tear down the cubicle walls, in favor of home workers, open environments that don’t suggest the hoarding and protection of office supplies – a gesture mimicking the secretaries of decades past – but rather the interaction of technologies, eradicate the emphasis on personal space in the form of portable felt walls – mimicking the corner office mentality of executives from the Mad Men era, and create an environment where productivity is combined with connectivity to achieve ubiquity – not the “face to face” of the every Wednesday team meeting, but the “any time we choose” of useful chat systems with video conference call capability (like Google Talk and Skype) and the truly collaborative document environment (e.g. of Google Docs). Stop flying contractors around, putting them in hotels, and taxi-ing them to the office to spend most of their time in a closed room using a laptop, and let them work from a technological cockpit whenever possible, saving money and increasing effectiveness. That “little something” you get from being able to stick your head in and talk to them is just your pre-Skype nostalgia talking – it’s a myth, already put to rest by effective distance learning in the academic field.

People seem to think that technology is unconnected to the other aspects of corporate life like the cubicle and the collared shirt. But this denies that the workplace has meaning, just as work itself does. I worked at a corporation that filled the building with so many file cabinets that it couldn’t find places for people to sit, and ended up shrinking the cubicles and jamming people in like egg crates. Most of those file cabinets stand empty, or contain boxes of analog office supplies like white out. What are we in the seventies? But can they keep the network up? Oftentimes, no. Can they equip people to work at home when it goes down? They’re starting to ask the question, but come on – does it have to be one or the other? Technology is connected to how we think about what makes a team a team. Is it people who order bad pizza together once a week, or is it people that collaborate with maximum efficiency and keep the company they want? If it’s the former, then you have to jam a lot of computers onto an overloaded network and force everyone to use the same tech just like you force them to get lunch from the same vendor for that warm, fuzzy once a week get together. Technology is connected to how we think about management? Is it the micromanager who hires someone to book his appointments (a relic of eighties), or is it the team traffic control operator who facilitates effective application of resources? If it’s the former, you’ll have to be where he or she is, instantly accessible in person, and you’ll spend most of your time commuting to and from work, eating at work, and staying late into the evening and coming in on weekends. Who *goes* to the office on weekends? Isn’t that a commentary on the shackles that lock our technology to our desk, us to this albeit obsolete technology, and convince us that this is the world of work, because we’re all in it together?

Being effective in technology requires, as a matter of principle, creating a work environment in which workers can be trusted with nearly any responsibility that is within their realm of competence, in which superficialities take a back seat to productivity (I’m reminded of the coworker people complained was “weird” who, upon researching his stats, it was revealed he was 500% more productive than any of them) – since when did a collar, a clean shave, and a complete absence of personality make you a better contributor to the team. And in which the shroud of control, of domination, of mistrust, and of outright implied condescension (“we can’t let them have that much freedom, because then we’d have to give it to everyone”) is left behind in favor of expressions and measures of results that make technology the ally instead of the enemy. It’s almost as if some companies are suspicious that too much use of technology makes you a dangerous nerd who’s going to seize control of the system – and from themselves. Let go. And, if you want to be successful, the president driving us to faster and more ubiquitous broadband, by itself, won’t be enough. You’ll need to let go more quickly, let go of more things, and change yourself – change the very definition of what it is you do for the company, what your work is, and what it is for others to work for you.

• Image by yoppy via Flickr

  By default, it’s not designed to scan to images like jpg, although it will. It is designed to create PDFs. If you’re looking for a photo scanner, this isn’t it.

• It’s lightening fast on scans. The video demonstrations on Youtube are spot on.
• It has the best OCR (optical character recognition) of anything I’ve seen. It creates PDFs from 30 year old typewriter type, that I can copy/paste into anything.
• OCR takes longer to process after scanning, but it’s automated. It doesn’t make you stop and spell check everything.
• It’s not a TWAIN scanner – which is to say it will not be picked up by your various graphics programs, etc. It does one thing, and does it exceedingly well.
• It comes with software that is amazingly versatile and can be configured to go straight to PDF, into Evernote, or do other things.
• It handles paper 8.5″ in width down to business card and receipt width. It comes with business card recognition software.
• It’s incredibly small. You can carry it on a plane. Open a lid, and it powers on. Close it, and it shuts off. AC or USB power.

Now, the reason I love it: I am tired of being surrounded by the thick walls of paper that have accumulated for decades of active information, entrepreneurial, and literary driven life. I’ve been on a slow, slipping, Sisyphean climb toward paperlessness for years. Unfortunately, it was hampered by inadequate technology. No more. Boxes and boxes of documents are now crisp, clean PDFs, searchable when needed. There is more to go, but I can see the stacks getting smaller. I can see freedom over the top.

At about the time that ebooks are on the rise, reducing the size of a library to a drive (for that matter, Google books is a great alternative), file cabinets are destined for the local Goodwill. All you need is a ScanSnap and a good shredder. I’ve got both and I’m watching my office shrink.

Image via CrunchBase

Robust Testing: For the first run, I gave them what I consider to be an exceedingly challenging packet of material. It was piles of letters and hand-scrawled notes, separated by paperclips where the PDFs should be separate files. The paper ranged from notebook paper with spiral edges, plain notebook paper, typing paper, cards, flyers, stationary paper, newsprint, envelopes, parts of envelopes, and copy paper, to notes scrawled on various scraps of myriad sizes. All items were circa 1981-1995 (yes, up to 28 years old in some cases, and no newer than 14 years old). Memory is precious – I gave Pixily things I didn’t want to forget.

TEST RESULTS

• The PDFs were flawlessly separated. Nothing ended up in one that belonged in another.
• All pages were in the correct order.
• All the truly blank sides were skipped, including blank sides of lined notebook paper.
• Yet nothing with the smallest iota of print was skipped – including the back side of a “blank” envelope that featured a small code stamp. Simultaneously, the blank side of only half an envelope that contained no such stamp was appropriate not scanned. Consequently, bits of things I didn’t notice when I sent the packet were picked up and I’m glad they were not lost.
• Nothing more was cut off than about 2 millimeters at the top of some 20-year old stationary paper, so that the top of a hand-written page number was all that was lost.
• All pages were fully scanned, except for the bottom left corner of one piece of notebook paper that was solidly folded over. They tell you to unfold those, and it was my fault that I did not in that one case. Two words were obscured as a result of my mistake. Ideally, I’d prefer it if they’d caught and straightened it, but in a rather challenging stack of 15-year old spiral notebook paper, I’m not surprised. Not bad.
• All PDFs were flawlessly aligned. Even in PDFs with pages of multiple widths, all pages of any one width flowed spot on from one page to another.
• All text (even faint pencil) was eminently readable, PDF resolution was superb, and things that I didn’t think would be searchable were not only quite searchable in the downloadable PDFs (including newsprint that had gone beyond yellow to brown, and handwritten letters with elaborate penmanship), but the PDF size was surprisingly small and quick to download. Small means 9mb for a 20-page document that included a photo postcard with stamp, and graphically rich stationary, 10mb for a 22-page document that was heavy on handwriting)
• A note on the interface: it seems to go into perpetual ‘hourglass’ mode if you check a document and click “Download PDF” at the top, but choosing “Download PDF” in the More dropdown, next to any one document, produced an instant dialogue to save, and downloads were lightening fast, where not instant, even on 15-20 page PDFs with diverse content.
• I got my packet back in the mail in the same exact order as the PDF pages, with one exception – only the postcard on top had the front (photo side) scanned first (correctly) but the back (text portion) face up (just like I sent it). So they did better than perfect. I was able to rapidly verify every single page in each PDF before shredding the packet I received. The option exists to have them shred, but these documents were too valuable for me not to verify.

SUCCESS SCORE

Pixily scores a whopping 99.9 percent for doing better than exactly what they say they will do, within an astounding point one percent (.1%) margin of error (never cutting off all of a single word – and never really a word – just part of a page number – except in the case of a heavily creased and very small and hard to spot fold hidden deep in a stack of frilly spiral notebook pages (they tell you to take out such creases, so even though it’s a miss, they could have justifiably treated it as intentional – still, in an entire bankers box of business files, the possibility of a folded over corner here and there is high – so be aware and inspect before you send. In their maximum 50 impressions per envelope approach, it’s easier for you to spot when loading).

Conclusion: Simply amazing. In short, if Pixily maintains the quality control they have now, it seems you can trust them with just about anything. Rock on, Pixily. You’re the epitome of the kind of business I want to be in.