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By Root 666 0

into bytes (scan them) and then bits (shred them)!” Then I would probably hang myself at the commercial break. A screenwriter friend of mine by the name of John August talked me into scanning and tossing everything a couple of years ago and I’ve never looked back. Since John has scripts flying around every day, he tends to have more experience managing paper than most, so I listened to him (you should listen to him, too, on his INCREDIBLE advice-for-writers Web site, JohnAugust.com). Pretty much any scanner with an auto-feeder will work (using just a flatbed plate scanner to get one page at a time will suck the joy out of your brain). I use the Epson GT-S50 (they’re not paying me, blah blah blah), which sails through twenty-five pages per minute. Dedicated document scanners are actually somewhat ’spensive ($200 to $500), but you can get one o’ those printer/scanner/fax/copier jobbies for around $75. They’re not amazeballs, but they WILL get the job done. Justify it this way: If there was a bunch of trash in your house and you could give a tiny wizard $75 to make it disappear, wouldn’t you?? (You should also ask the tiny wizard for invincibility and more attractive genitals while he’s there.)

Once scanned, I save each doc as a PDF with the following file nomenclature: [company name]_[type of doc]_[date]. If you’re an example-phile, then here’s how that might look: Allstate_ auto_2011.10.23. (The date your file was created will be saved as metadata, but I like to include the year, month, and day in the name of the file so that I can “sort by name” in the file tree.) Not all documents come from companies, mind you, so you can do [type of doc]_[subject]_[date]. Let’s say you’re a contract killer hired to remove the czar of ancient Serbia. Your murder purchase order might look like this: Assassination_Czar_1346.5.30.

Next, it’s off to the elimination box! Shredders are cheap and fun to use. You can imagine the screams of the documents that were sent to make your life worse as they go through the rotating death wheels. Destroy every piece of paper with your name and address on it that you don’t need. Naturally SOME docs have to be kept as originals—birth certificates, legal notices, your mortgage or rental contracts, for example—so you can keep those in the traditional file-folder system. Currently it’s not possible to remove ALL of the paper in your life, but the scan and shred can help you get rid of MOST of it.

Stop being a filthy hoarder. Take all the stuff you don’t normally use and trash it. You will feel lighter and more in control. Think of it as “filing it into forever” or at least “wiping the excess poo off your brain’s bum.”

CHARACTERCIZE

If you have the energy, make a note of all of your stuff.

When you can see all of it on a page, it might be more apparent to you what you need to keep and what you can scrap.

LEARN TO SAY NO (BUT NOT TO THIS CHAPTER)

It’s easy to identify the obvious time hijackers that wish to hamper your workflow when you need to get down to business—mindless web browsing, games, chatty neighbors—but sometimes you can get into a gray area in which things have the ability to disguise themselves as being helpful for your career. On their own, they might very well be, but in the context of the frenetic pace of your life, they actually run the risk of doing more damage than good. Recently I took on a side project that resulted in utter failure. I was brought in to lay down guide vocals for a film so that the actors would have tracks to choreograph their scenes to. I was given six days to learn ten songs that they wanted to record all in one day. That should have been my first *abort* clue, but sometimes I see red flags more as pretty decorations than as warnings that should be heeded. I was really busy working on a few other things, but I reasoned that I could learn the tracks in the car, mashed in between the cushions of my life.

THAT WAS A FAT SACK OF WRONG. The day came where I stood in a recording studio and proceeded to waste both hard drive space and tape (they were recording