Feature request: reminders from scans

[John Whitehead 1]

Hi

 

I'm successfully going paperless thanks to Doxie and Evernote but I have a fairly major problem. When a bill comes in or some other important document I tend to scan it in immediately and then file away documents in batches, congratulating myself on my efficiency. But I frequently forget to set the reminders to tell me to act before the due dates in these important communications. 

 

My solution to this would involve coloured stickers as you've used before in the Moleskine products. This one would be in the shape of a bell and would come in a range of colours. Before I scanned the document I would find the due date and stick a sticker in the margin at the same level as the date. If there were two or more dates on the line I'd underline the relevant date in pencil. You would OCR my document and make a reminder for me based on that date and the colour of the sticker -- green for a month before, yellow for a week before and red for on the day, or similar (might even be user configurable...).

 

That way I wouldn't pay such a heavy price for my amnesia!

 

Keep up the great work

 

Best

 

J

 

 

[gazumped 11,713]

Hi.  I tend to scan to a desktop folder so I can edit or rename the scanned document if I need to do so.  In general I'll batch add them to Evernote once I'm done.

 

That folder though allows me to select individual files to add to Evernote immediately if they're important,  and I'll set reminders if necessary at the same time.

 

If that's not practical for you,  you could consider the alternative of going back to an old-fashioned 12-folder system,  and where you get a bill or some time-sensitive action due in August,  you scan the paperwork,  then file it in the August folder.  Come the end of July,  get out the August items and sort them into weeks - or whatever other groups might be important to you.  Deal with those in order.  For a normal number of domestic items in a year that should be quite feasible.

 

The alternative is to have to select "do you want to set a reminder Y/N?" at the end of every scan,  which would rather slow things down a lot...

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

I'm successfully going paperless thanks to Doxie and Evernote but I have a fairly major problem. When a bill comes in or some other important document I tend to scan it in immediately and then file away documents in batches, congratulating myself on my efficiency. But I frequently forget to set the reminders to tell me to act before the due dates in these important communications.

 

John, I understand your pain/need.

 

Unitl/IF Evernote provides the feature you requested, you might try this work-around:

1. Pre-sort your batches of bills into near-term (you define it) and regular/normal term, regarding when the bill is due
2. Scan the near-term bills
3. Import into an EN Notebook named "Inbox.Bills.NT"
   1. The prefix of "Inbox." is a signal to you that these bills need to be processed
   2. The ".NT" means "near term", of course
   3. Of course, you can use any naming convention that is meaningful to you
4. So your daily workflow could be to review/process any bills in the Inbox.Bills.NT Notebook
   1. Set an EN Reminder 
   2. Move to the desired permanent Notebook
   3. The goal is to process this Inbox and keep it empty

An alternate method is to

1. add a prefix or suffix of the scanned file name before you import it to indicate near-term, "[NT]", for example.
2. Scan all of your bills into the same "Inbox"
3. Then do a search (could be a Saved Search)  in the Inbox Notebook for "intitle:[NT]"
4. Process these same as in Step #4 above.