Greeting cards

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

When we receive greeting cards, I scan them before tossing. I use a descriptive title like "Birthday card to BnF from Wendy 2011" & it goes into the "letters" notebook. As you may have guessed from the name of the notebook, I also do this with letters. The title of the scanned letter would be something like "letter from Alyssa YYYYMMDD" where YYYYMMDD is the date of the letter. If a particular topic is covered, I would add that to the body of the note.

If I want to retrieve any of these notes, I go to the "letters" notebook & search on the name of the person. If I want to see all the birthday cards I received last year, the search would be:

"to BnF" birthday card 2010

The first part, "to BnF" excludes any cards I've scanned that were from me to someone else. Yeah, I do that too. In that case, the note title would be "Birthday card from BnF to Wendy 2010".

I know this sounds a bit obsessive. But I used to save many of the cards & letters we'd received from people. Often, I'd go through them & toss some. But there were many that I sort of wanted to toss, but at the same time, really didn't want to, simply because of the sentimental value. When I really started trying to go paperless ~five years ago, I started scanning them & only keeping the very special ones. It's really nice to be able to read some cards & letters from friends & family who are no longer of this world. It's also nice to not have them taking up space & even nicer to have them much more easily retrieved from Evernote than having to get them out from a box at the bottom of a closet.

[Jamie Todd Rubin 17]

Funny, I recently considered doing the same thing. As it is, I take photos of all of my kids artwork from school, knowing that at some point it will be lost or destroyed. At least I'll have a photographic record going back to the beginning for them.