It is Tuesday at 10:47 and you have three PDFs waiting to be signed, two more that need pages deleted, and a 32 MB deck that won't go through email. Most knowledge workers lose 30 to 60 minutes a day to PDF friction. Here is a workflow that gets it back.
The trick is not a single tool — it is a sequence you trust. Capture, clean, share, archive. Repeat.
Capture: get every PDF into one inbox
Pick one folder. Call it `/Inbox/PDFs`. Every PDF you receive — email attachment, scanner output, web download — lands there first. No exceptions. Treat it like an email inbox: things flow in, but never sit forever. The point is to stop hunting through Downloads, Desktop and three Slack DMs for that contract.
Once a day (or twice if you live in PDFs), open the inbox and process. Use Flint's documents view as your working space — drag in, work on, move out.
Clean: edit, reorder, redact before you share
Knowledge work runs on shared PDFs, and dirty PDFs cost you twice — once when you send the wrong version, again when you redo it. Before anything leaves your machine, run it through three checks.
First, edit anything that is wrong — typos, dates, names. Second, reorder or delete pages that don't belong. Third, redact anything sensitive. Two minutes here saves a panicked recall email later.
Share: sign and compress in one pass
If a PDF is going to a client or counterparty, sign it before you compress it. Signatures add data; compressing afterwards keeps the file lean. Sign in the browser, then compress down to under 5 MB for email-friendly delivery.
The rule of thumb: contracts under 2 MB, decks under 10 MB, anything bigger goes via a share link instead of an attachment. You'll stop getting 'mailbox full' bounces immediately.
Archive: name it once, find it forever
The single biggest time sink is searching for a PDF you already have. Fix it with a naming convention: `YYYY-MM-DD_Counterparty_Doc-Type.pdf`. Sort by name and your folder reads like a timeline. Stick the signed copy in `/Archive/<year>/<quarter>` and forget it.
For anything you might need to edit again, keep the editable source separately. The archived PDF is the final, not the working copy.
FAQ
How long does this workflow take to set up?
About 20 minutes the first time — create the folders, write down your naming convention, bookmark the Flint tools you use most. After that it runs itself.
Do I need to install anything?
No. The whole workflow runs in the browser via Flint, which keeps your PDFs on your machine rather than uploading them to a server. That alone removes the slowest step of most workflows.
What if I work across devices?
Use a synced folder (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) for `/Inbox/PDFs` and `/Archive`. Flint works the same on any machine, so the workflow is portable.
How often should I clear the inbox?
Daily for high-volume roles, weekly for everyone else. The longer PDFs sit, the more context you lose about why you received them.
A PDF workflow is not glamorous, but neither is losing an hour a day to admin. Set it up once and the time compounds. Open Flint and run your next PDF through the whole sequence — capture, clean, share, archive — in under five minutes.