JANUARY 2005 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD

Ring Out the Analog

Two decades ago, technologists promised us a “paperless office” in which all documents would be handled in electronic form. Paper-free business as a practical possibility is probably still half a century away, but the digital world is sneaking up on us. This new year might be a good time to stop to consider what old-fashioned analog items you might want to discard now that you can save them in digital form.

At this point, digital has three key advantages over analog. First, digital is smaller; you can save space by digitizing things and discarding the originals. Second, it is easy to make digital copies, which is a helpful way to reduce the risk of losing something important. Third, it might be easier to find something in digital form, especially something like a document, because you can arrange digital files in as many folders as it takes to organize them in whatever way makes the most sense to you.

You already know that letters sent by e-mail take up less space than ones sent by postal mail and that digital photos cost much less than photo prints, but here are a few more ideas. These are documents you might want to keep only in digital form, throwing away the paper in order to simplify your life and save space.

• The phone book. It’s the thickest book on the shelves in most houses, but who actually reads it? How often do you look up a number in the printed telephone directory? If it’s less than once a month, you might be better off tossing the phone book and looking up phone numbers online.
• Tax forms and instructions. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requires U.S. taxpayers to keep any instructions they use to fill out their taxes for three years or longer. However, that doesn’t mean you have to keep the instruction booklets. All IRS instructions are available for download at the IRS web site, and the PDF files occupy a megabyte or less. While you’re at it, get the fill-in PDF tax forms and schedules, and you can save your tax forms in digital form too.
• Memorabilia. Do you really want to save that Miami Beach postcard and your elementary school report cards till they start to fade and fall apart? You can scan things like this and save them on a CD, and they’ll stay digitally fresh for years. Make two copies of the CD and store them in separate places to reduce the risk of losing these memory-laden items.
• Cookbooks. If you cook regularly, of course you’ll want to keep your cookbooks. But if you really cook for only a few special occasions a year, you might want to type the 20 recipes you actually use into your computer and throw the cookbooks away. Don’t worry about what happens if you ever need a new recipe. There are millions of them online.
• Maps. Do you go to Mapquest or a similar online service every time you need to drive somewhere? If so, what good are all those old paper road maps you’ve been saving?
• Dictionaries. Computers are so fast now that the CD version of a dictionary could actually be faster than the 3000-page tome edition. And most readers’ definitional needs are met just fine by the many free online dictionaries.
• Envelopes. Now that I send letters by e-mail and pay bills on web sites, I don’t use nearly as many envelopes as I did a few years ago. If you have a huge stash of envelopes from which you use maybe one a month, consider cutting back your inventory to, say, a ten-year supply. That goes for the return address stickers too.

The other big analog category is tape — magnetic tape, that is. I know more than a few people who still record and play tapes every day, but if you’re not in that category, take a critical look at your tape collection.

• VHS. The last time I played a movie on a VHS video cassette was, um, 1999. Commercial VHS cassettes have a useful life span of about 10 to 20 years. Realistically, what is the chance that you’ll watch your entire VHS movie collection before the magnetic particles go south?
• Home video. If you have taken videos that mean something to you, for heaven’s sake get them into the computer and onto a DVD while you still can!
• Audio cassettes. Since I replaced the cassette deck in my car with a CD player, I play only about 1 or 2 audio cassettes a week, and I reduced my collection of music on cassette by about half. The worst commercial audio cassettes have a life span of only 10 years; the best, probably less than 50. If you have cassettes you wouldn’t ever want to listen to, now would be a good time to throw them away.
• Blank tapes and scratch tapes. How many tapes do you save with the idea that you will record something on them someday? How many tapes do you actually use for that purpose? If you have more than a ten-year supply of tapes to record on, it would be a good idea to cut back.
• Floppy disks. Yes, they’re digital disks, not analog tapes, but the same idea applies. Who uses floppy disks anymore, now that CDs cost less and store 500 times as much data? Those floppies you saved from the early 1990s could damage your drive; throw them away! If you have valuable files on floppy disks, copy them to a CD, assuming it’s not already too late.

As I said, the digital world is sneaking up on us, so some of your analog stuff might have lost its value right before your eyes. I remember when I had a book of ZIP codes in my office, but times have changed. Don’t surround yourself with archaic analog clutter. Ring out the old, ring in the new.

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