I scan to compressed TIFF black&white, resolution 150 dpi. My files are small, for example, 11-page document (progress notes) takes 184kb. May be you scanning your papers in gray format or 300 dpi? I use Photoshop to resize TIFF files scanned in a wrong format. It works fine for 1-page documents, but it is time consuming for multi-page files, because Photoshop doesn't support multi-page TIFF, and you would have to resize each page separately. I prefer to scan in TIFF because of small size. It is easy to convert TIFF to PDF if needed.
