I was reading Ben Brook’s Going Paperless blog post the other day and contemplating how I gradually went paperless over the past two years.
My deep dark secret is that I used to be a printer fiend. I’d joke with my IT support person that I saw a printer duty cycle as a challenge, and used to crank out reams of printed materials each month. By contrast, since January I’ve printed out a total of 50 pages of paper on my little office USB printer.
At least for me, sometime around 2008 paper went from having an advantage in some circumstances to being pretty much always more trouble than it is worth. A coworker of mine will flat out refuse to take paper copies of documents at meetings, asking instead that the person email him an electronic version of the document. I’m not quite at that point yet, but I have way too much to do to bother managing paper (I run any paper documents through a scanner and then shred them). And with ubiquitous access to electronic documents on my phone, desktop, etc., there’s just no reason to ever have to deal with paper if I can avoid it.
And I pretty much never print out materials for meetings I’m responsible for, mostly because I’m too lazy to figure out which of the myriad of USB cables entangled under my desk represents my printer. I haven’t had business cards for years.
I don’t think I’m entirely alone on this, but I’m still definitely in the minority compared to people I know. I think this is a failure of the way we train and acculturate people to use new technologies, which usually doesn’t extend much beyond mimicing existing processes with new technologies.
I am always amazed, for example, at the number of people who will email me 5 or 6 item agendas for upcoming meetings by placing them in a Word document and then attaching that document to the email. Aside from the fact that Microsoft Office is a Satanic product, it is much more helpful just to put the list of agenda items in the body of the email where I can easily search for and read it on any device I own.
But, of course, end users have been taught that an agenda is something that lives in Microsoft Word (and, in fact, I’ve received an occasional negative comment from someone who was expecting the agenda in Word or, in one case, PowerPoint!!)
We don’t even have a printer at the moment, but I admit there are some things I print at work because I apparently cannot be trusted to remember my breaks and lunches without it in my face all the time.