Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [14]
I took pictures of all my eagles. I love eagles and have amassed a collection of eagle sculptures, picture books, postcards, knick knacks, and hand puppets. I took pictures of mugs. I have a collection of special coffee mugs. A few of them have eagles, but all of them have some connection to my past. I call some of them my “one-hundred-thousand-dollar mugs” because they are all I have to show for a one-hundred-thousand-dollar investment in a start-up company. I photographed all of those along with their companion T-shirts. The most rewarding part was putting them all in a box and delivering the whole collection to the Computer History Museum—they were someone else’s clutter now!
If any of these treasures are ever lost in an earthquake or a fire, I’ll have nice remembrances of them. And if my heirs don’t want to hang on to the cluttered remnants of my life after I’m gone, they’ll always have these images and my notes about them if they want to see what was important to me.
Of course, my collection of two hundred CDs also needed to be ripped onto my computer. I also had several drawers- and shelves ful of home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings on audiocassette that were collecting dust and needed to be digitized. A service converted the 8mm movies to VHS tapes, which were later converted to CDs.
The second prong of getting my life digitized was to start scanning and recording everything I did from that point forward. In 2002 I decided to go paperless and to scan and not store or file any paper documents. I had already resolved in 1995 not to take any more paper newspapers. (Later, I was at a dinner with New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and his description of their investments in new printing plants convinced me I was right in believing that paper newspapers were on the wane.)
For new paper it was easy. When billing statements or important notices came in, I scanned them in less time than it used to take me to physically file them away. And thankfully, the amount of paper I’ve needed to scan has shrunk each year since I began. If you piled up all the paper mail I used to receive annually, it would measure about thirteen feet high. Twelve of those feet were utter junk that could be safely thrown away—generic credit card offers, random bulk catalogs, “you may already be a winner” mailings, and the like. (Note: My goal is to record everything I actually read, not what others send me. It’s my choice, not theirs, that counts.) Only the remaining foot of paper was worth scanning, and even that has grown less as I’ve switched to digital bills and statements.
Nowadays it’s much easier to avoid paper. All the technical magazines and news sources I read are “born digital,” as are nearly all books. For legal reasons I keep a few items in paper, such as stock certificates, but not many. At that time, I started signing everything I could digitally, avoiding the creation, transmission, and especially storage of any paper.
As scanned documents and pictures piled up into my surrogate memory, I faced the challenge of figuring out how best to organize it. I began with what I had to work with: the folder hierarchy that every computer user is familiar with (every folder contains a list of files and subfolders, and every subfolder contains its own list of files and sub-subfolders, and so on). I filed my documents in folders according to a set of categories that made sense to me. From the design point of view this was not perfect, but I had to get started