In my technology consulting practice, I’ve discovered something that almost all of my clients have in common:

They have too much paper in their lives.
(…and they desperately want to get rid of as much of it as possible!)

With the advent of scanners (and with digital information becoming the primary means by which we communicate with one another), people are searching for a workable “File Cabinet 2.0″ solution — something that takes the solidity of sticking something in a drawer… and modernizes it.

Right now for Mac users, two of my favorite programs to help tame piles of paper are Evernote and DEVONthink. They each have their strengths and, when used together properly, I think that they can form the backbone of a “paperless life”.

Going paperless certainly isn’t without it’s own pitfalls but, truly, few things are more professionally satisfying to me than seeing a palpable look of relief on people’s faces as we shrink their clutter down to the size of a disk drive.

The Big Picture (With Details)

Evernote is a fantastic program (a platform, really) to collect and access your information from almost any type of device — and from anywhere that you can get an internet connection. But with it’s premium service restricting users to 500MB/month of storage, it isn’t necessarily the best solution for people who have a mountain of paper to digitize. (Although companies like PIXILY are trying to fill that need for Evernote users.)

DEVONthink excels at making sense of a big pile of paper.   Not only can it scan in and index an amount of paper that is limited only by your hard drive space, it can also collect your electronic records (just like in Evernote.) and merge the two “piles” together.   DEVONthink will allow you to organize your files hierarchically (something Evernote won’t do), and it also has a sophisticated relational database which helps to uncover connections between documents that you might not necessarily find yourself.  Add in a long history of developing great products for the Mac community and you’ve got yourself a deep, powerful program that is written to take full advantage of the Apple framework.

For my clients’ workflows, I generally think of Evernote as short-term memory and DEVON as long-term memory: The stuff that they’re currently working on (and need easy web access to) goes into Evernote. When it’s time to archive stuff away, DEVON scoops it up.  As currently constituted, both are useful supplements to one another.

But as it is so often true in life, “not knowing how to talk to one another” is also a fairly common complaint in the digital world as well – and it can be a real challenge to get two programs to speak each others language.

Is there a way to bridge the divide between Evernote and DEVONthink and help these two programs communicate with one another more readily?

The answer is “yes!” And the solution involves a couple of AppleScripts that I’ve written for the job.

The AppleScripts

• One script is used to move items from Evernote to DEVONthink, while the other moves items from DEVONthink to Evernote.
• You should always proceed cautiously at first to understand how each script works before moving large amounts of your files around. I use this script myself and feel very comfortable with using it, but I cannot accept any responsibility for any data misadventure you might suffer (e.g., Use at your own risk!).  I’d suggest starting with a file or two until you get the hang of things.

Do *YOU* use these programs the de-clutter your lives?  Leave A Comment With Your “Paperless Office Strategies”!