Kevin Warnock

I’ve been reading the famous book Getting Things Done by David Allen. I’m trying to get more organized so I can get seriously productive again.

Getting Things Done book cover

Allen advises getting a handheld label maker and using it freely to label manilla folders, which he advises using in great quantity. He disapproves of hanging file folders, and I see why, as I just removed all of them from my fire proof file cabinet, which I’ve moved right beside my desk. I now have lots of empty space, since manilla folders take so little of it. It’s a simple piece of advice, and it’s advice well worth taking, as I can buy 100 manilla file folders for $5.99. Hanging file folders are also $5.99 a box, but the box only contains 25 folders. So I save space and money.

Amazon has dozens of models of label makers for sale. They start at about $20. That I can deal with. What I can’t begin to fathom is how costly they are to use. They use cartridges of tape that cost about $25 each at Office Depot (less at Amazon). This would be OK if you could get a thousand labels out of a cartridge, but the cartridges only contain 26 feet of tape, or about 77 labels! After sales tax, this 1/2″ wide tape costs over a dollar a foot! So to label a file folder it takes 3″, or $.25 worth of tape. But the folder itself only costs $.06. So the label, which is tiny, costs 400% more than the folder, which contains far, far more material than the label.

This is robbery similar to that practiced by ink jet printer makers, which sell the ink at thousands of dollars a gallon. I understand the label makers are probably sold at a slight loss, but it’s not fair to make up for that loss on the first roll of tape purchased. I would much prefer to spend $150 for the label maker but have it include a 1,000 foot roll of tape that might last for years. Yes, this tape is probably more than just paper and glue, since these printers use a thermal technology to print. But so do cheap fax machines, and I can buy a roll of thermal fax paper that contains the equivalent of thousands of inches of 1/2″ wide labels for a pitance. Look at the size of the thermally printed receipts retailers routinely give out these days. My grocery store gives me a receipt a couple of feet long by 3″ wide. If that had been printed on a label maker, the receipt would cost tens of dollars to print in consumables.

I headed over to the part of the store that sells file folder labels by the letter sized sheet. There the price per label was about 3.5 cents per label instead of 25 cents. Still a fortune compared to white copy paper at $.0001 per label sized piece of paper.

One truly cost effective way to print nice labels is to go back to dot matrix printing, which lets you print one label at a time. One can buy a box of 5,000 5/8″ x 2 3/4″ white labels for $22.54, or $.0045 per label, less than half a penny per label. That’s more like it. I found a USB to parallel printer cable on Amazon for just $9.99. Now all I need is a dot matrix printer, easily found on Craigslist used for $25 – $50. I can set up a Word document to the size of label and just hit print, and one label should be printed out, not wasting anything. The big pain is that I would have another printer junking up my office. I already have an inkject scanner/fax/printer and a large black and white laser printer for economical printing. But I do have a nice Ikea cabinet I keep the printers in, and there is room in there for a small dot matrix printer. So this could be done for about $100, and I would never have to buy labels again, provided the adhesive didn’t dry out. I would probably have to throw out the unused labels every five years or so, but even so, my cost for essentially unlimited labels going forward would be less than $5 per year. Contrast that with potentially $5 per week with a ‘cheap’ label maker.

For now, I have decided to use a 10 cent ball point pen to hand write on my new manilla file folders. I like my handwriting, and my file cabinet is now neat, organized and handwritten, which is just great for now.