Geek Girlfriends

I am moving out of my home office and into beautiful space in an office building in town. (Would Don Draper be that brilliant in a converted dining room? No. Me either.) I’ve been planning this for weeks. And my office is finally ready to go. Today the final touch – high-speed Internet – gets installed. So it’s moving day.

I hate moving. So to make today as easy as possible, I have been getting rid of junk, de-cluttering, and wherever possible turning physical things digital so I won’t have to carry them. I did a Top 10 a while back where I listed ways to clean up your desk. But a couple of the tools I have been using from that list are so great that I think they warrant more explanation.

At first glance, the two Web site services Pixily.com and Shoeboxed.com seem very similar. Which one should you use? That depends on what sort of mess you are trying to clean up.

Shoeboxed.com is a brilliant tool for capturing all that paper mess that accumulates around an office or home because you know you will want it again: Receipts for purchases you might want later because of expense reports, taxes, or warranties, business cards, even hand-written notes about cash purchases you would like to track. When your paper receipts arrive at Shoeboxed.com it is not only scanned in but organized by store. Your private online storage space keeps a running total of your expenses and allows you to send it from there directly to your accountant. (Don’t have a bookkeeper yet? Outright.com has partnered with Shoeboxed.com so you might want to check that out.) When business cards arrive at Shoeboxed.com, they get scanned in and names, phone numbers and addresses are gathered into a digital form that you can then export to your Blackberry or iPhone or to Outlook or many other formats you might use. The site offers plans that start at free (you’ll have to do your own scanning) to $50 a month but the very-reasonable $9.95 a month plan has a free trial.

Pixily.com is another service that digitizes what we once all thought had to be stored on paper in a filing cabinet: Contracts, kids’ school records, insurance statements, magazine clippings, paid bills, tax records. I am terrible at filing. So I have been slowly emptying my too-small and overstuffed filing cabinet over the past couple of months and sending it all off to Pixily.com. When my paper gets there, it is scanned in and turned into searchable text. So even if I never get around to tagging my papers (the virtual equivalent of putting them into file folders), I can search and find what I need. Once I find it, I can send it off to whoever needs it or print it. Recently my daughter asked for the phone list for her class so she could do Valentine’s cards. She gave me a skeptical look when she asked and said, “You have no idea where it is, do you?” (I told you I’m bad at filing and no one ever told me before I set out on this parenting thing how much paper comes with kids.) But I simply logged onto Pixily.com and searched for the name of someone in her class. It won me back the respect of my daughter – for about 5 minutes. This service has also freed up space in my office and simplified my life. Papers that once piled up and made me feel inept and quickly spirited away leaving my desk and my conscience clear. In fact, it is working so well for me that I asked Pixily.com to send me a big box so that I can just empty my filing cabinet into that and have Fedex take it away instead of moving any paper at all to my new office.

So all I have to move today is my desk, computer, and about 1,000 gadgets. So I better get going.

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