Just where is the "Paperless Office"?

For those who haven’t been keeping up with current events and the allocation of “special” awareness days, today was “Earth Day”, which is all about how we are looking after our planet. Last week though, I was thinking about the “paperless office”. A term that is well known yet is still pure fiction and a non-reality in today’s office spaces.

The real question is why isn’t it a reality? Why do we rely upon paper for so much? I realise that there many tasks that do require paper – printing of receipts, perhaps even quotations, books,…but most of what I see printed in the workplace is irrelevant printing and a waste – meeting minutes, reports, emails, whitepapers, etc.

In my office, at work, we’ve recently gone through an exercise to replace all of the printers throughout the building in order to improve efficiency and reduce costs. I, however, have taken this opportunity to go one step further – I’ve stopped printing entirely.

I’m lucky enough have dual screens connected to my desktop computer, so can easily read items on one screen and work on the other, my emails are displayed on screen and I’ve even started to use my phone as a method for scribbling down notes rather than use Post-It notes. Most importantly, this hasn’t affected my working practices and I’ve survived! Nothing has been a problem. Improved TFT screen technologies make it viable to read from directly and existing technologies such as networking and email makes it easy to share information digitally.

Whilst I realise that not every one has these computer resources to avoid printing, I do know that most of us hit the print button without considering if we really need to print. If I had my way, I’d remove printers from every office, unless legitimate reasons could be made to leave a printer in place. Not only would this save paper, but it would also save huge amounts of money...…and it will help do just a little bit for Earth Day.