Are we Paperless or Clueless?

Posted by Jason Warnock on August 23 at 8:00 PM If I asked 10 modern office types about the idea of a “paperless” office and when, in their opinion, was the peak of our paper use in the office, what do you think they would guess? Surely the late 80’s? Perhaps any time in the not too distant past without email, all those letters being sent, memos, that must have used way more paper than now... Right? Or maybe the 60’s with the “Mad Men” style offices, four secretaries for every writer, all that typing and re-typing. Right?

In our office we do our best to only print important documents and strive obviously to only use recycled paper, but on a recent client breakfast meeting I noticed our team brought 3 copies of the proposal; one copy for the principal, one copy for our team and one back up. It was a relatively small proposal only 10 pages or so, but that’s still 30 pages of paper. What’s worse and you are probably already ahead of me here, we never even looked at the proposal during the meeting and of course we followed up the meeting with an electronic version later. Paperless or Clueless?

What really prompted me to examine this process was when I needed to break down and print a large amount of LEED documentation. I tried to hold out as long as I could, but reviewing and later referencing hundreds of pages in PDF was difficult and straining, not only on the eyes but on time. So when I called a printing company and sheepishly looked at printing several hundred pages, what did I discover? It’s still a booming industry and they are swamped with orders. In fact, calling around to couple other print companies to back this up, they have never been busier and the paper companies worried about their industry shrinking with the advent of the paperless office are laughing all the way to the bank. In the minds of the print and paper companies, paperless hasn’t slowed the demand, if anything it’s growing almost too fast for them to keep up.

So to answer the question off the top, when was our peak paper use in the office; Today. And tomorrow will be worse. Paperless or Clueless?

So what’s the cause of all this? The biggest culprit it seems is the very modern concerns for document security and “covering your ass”. How many people do you know who print emails and not just one email, but entire chains of email, each and every time something is added? Or email something, print it, fax it and print another for the “file” copy. With new document tools like Evernote (www.evernote.com) where cloud servers virtually store your information and allow access to web, email, hand written notes, or whatever why all the fear of lost documents. If you have to print an important email (and frankly I’m not sure why you ever need to print an email), trim it from the chain, print the important part, leave the rest virtual.

In our office we are going to push our commitment to the next level, embrace tools like Evernote and tablet style laptops to review documents and proposals, use web and virtual tools more and more. Printing will be our last resort. But why do this alone, what else does your office do? Do you have suggestions or actions that help you manage your workflow without paper?
Topics: recycling, sustainability        SHARE: