The Paperless Office ...

Since about 2000, I have been working with businesses who wanted to "go paperless". Since then I have developed a decent level of expertise with the processes, hardware, and software needed to prepare, scan, file, retrieve, and maintain paper documents. In fact, one of the businesses I worked with achieved total paperlessness, but there were so many complaints we finally put paper back in the bathrooms. (That is a joke! Ha, Ha)

But going paperless is tough for most of us. There is a certain level of "comfort" having a piece of paper that you can toss in your briefcase and read when you are away from your computer. It is really easy, say, to print all of your e-mail before leaving for a trip to read on the plane or even in bed in your hotel before dropping of to sleep.

PC Magazine recently published an article titled Three Steps to the Paperless Office. Here are some excerpts:

1. Think Before You Ink. The change has to start here. We all have to change how we look at paper. Before you print out anything, ask yourself if it is absolutely necessary. If you have a digital copy of that e-mail, why do you need a printed version? The green blog TreeHugger.com tried to build an eco-meme by asking people to add this line to their e-mail signatures: "Eco-Tip: Printing e-mails is usually a waste." Sure, it is a little preachy, but sometimes we need preachers to show us the way. We all probably send too much e-mail, but printing them out is downright sinful.

2. Preview Your Documents. The average employee prints six totally useless pages per day. All you have to do is walk over to the network printer in your office to see examples of them. You will usually find a tray filled with blank pages, misplaced spreadsheet fields, and random HTML fields from printed web pages. The average employee prints 1,410 of these wasted pages per year. And this problem is easy to fix: Just preview it first. The easiest way to do this is to use the print preview feature in whatever software you are using to print.

GreenPrint is a software package that automates the process. You can download a free version of GreenPrint from www.printgreener.com; an ad-free version is available for $35. GreenPrint Technologies claims that the average user of the package will save about $90 a year in paper and ink costs. This is a great feature that should become the default in both personal and office printers.

3. Print to PDF. It took a while, but PDF truly is a universal portable document format. And just attaching a Word doc to an e-mail is pretty universal too. Send digital files whenever you can.

There are more ways to cut back, of course, including printing on both sides of pages, electronic invoicing, and using multifunction devices to scan rather than copy, but those three steps alone could put a huge dent in paper waste. These changes won't take place overnight, but we have to look at those stacks of unused, underused, or never reused paper as the inexcusable waste that they are.

As you think about what you can do to minimize waste and become more "green", try these three steps. In the coming weeks watch for more posts about going paperless, including some inexpensive tools - both hardware and software - that may be just what you have been looking for to help you get started on your journey toward The Paperless Office.