There is no doubt that paper as the “final unique destination” has limitations. The chief one being the facility to copy and print out.

It’s a myth that digital docs lead to a paperless world. They lead to the world of massive printing because it is so easy to knock out one more copy at the touch of a button. The digital age consumes more paper, not less.

I sit next to a printer at the office and at least 20% of printouts are never picked up and another 40% are draft copies that will be modified and reprinted before finalisation. If there was any effort whatsoever in producing such a printout, no doubt our demand for paper would plummet.

We need a new term for the world of digital docs. Instead of “paperless,” perhaps we should call it “paper ready.”

The term “paperless” should really be more like “less paper”. You’re never going to get rid of paper. There will always be a purpose for using paper in some form.

The problem is that there just a lot of people out there that default to the use of a printed copy of a digital file for fairly insignificant things. I mean, really…do you need to print out a copy of an e-mail you just got so you can show it to your co-workers during a meeting? Or can you simply forward it to them and make a reference to it?

The goal should be to use “less paper”, not create “more paper” due to bad habits in a digital world.

I’ve recently developed a new paranoia about the “paperless” world. As a known and self-professed geek, I’m exactly the kind of person with the (perceived) ability to manipulate digital documents. As long as that seems more likely than paper forgery, I’m keeping important things (tax returns, bank statements, etc) on paper, lest I be fingered as a forger in some adversarial proceeding.

It bugs me when people equate "scanning" with "paperless." Though you can get rid of the physical paper, and the associated storage challenges, it does very little to improve on some of the organizational challenges paper presents.

Ignoring OCR (which is still a shaky thing), a scanned image of a document is just that: an image. A computer cannot distinguish between it and a LOLCat. I can put the images in folders and attach them to e-mails, but if I want to search for every document associated with, say "bicycles," I would have to go into relevant folders manually.

For something like "bicycles," I would likely have two or three places to look, but if the search term is broader, it might be more difficult. Doing any sort of cross-references search is even more challenging.

If, instead of a picture, it were a machine-readable document (a text file, for instance), I could do these searches. The text could also be easily incorporated into other documents. Storage space would often be less as well.

Scanners may be great for sucking in handwritten notes (though the previously mentioned advantages may make it worth the effort to transcribe them). Some would argue that it is the only way to get a signed document into a computer-based system. I would ask, why haven't we found a better way than pen to paper to authenticate a document. Nicholas Negroponte suggested, fourteen years ago, that the fax machine retarded these efforts. The scanner is merely a continuation of this trend.

Overall, though, I believe that a paperless office is about as useful as a paperless bathroom. You will never be able to totally eliminate it.

You guys are hitting on something I missed in my haste to self-referentially dress up the link for a post: the “paperless” usually ends when it becomes an “office.”

Like missbossy said, which was also mentioned in the article, people tend to print like it’s going out of style at office because it’s fast and free … to them. You spilled coffee on a page? Pity, let me print you the whole thing again. When I worked in a big office, I thought nothing of printing out some 40-some-odd-page document, but I’d never do that at home because it’s my nickel.

And no matter how stringent you might be about staying digital, as jeff said, someone will inevitably print one out anyway. It’s as much about having the right workflow in place, where people feel like they can actually do their jobs without paper copies, as it is simply guilting people into not wasting paper.

The “paperless” idea is probably more applicable to a home user who wants to archive all those old bills and receipts because those documents are simply for their own reference, and short of an audit, they’ll likely never print them again.

I noticed that there were no books in the paperless house of the future. For me, books make the home. A house without books is like a body without a soul.

For complex, rich thinking and creativity, paper remains the “ultimate destination” of choice. Digital media have yet to surpass books both for permanence and quality of thinking. It is impossible to achieve sustained attention and engagement while reading on a screen—at least not the type of sustained attention that is demanded by a good book. A novel or work of serious non-fiction takes time to read and digest. Searching for snippets and quotes on a computer will yield little of value if you haven’t already read the book.

I’m afraid the digital revolution will produce a technocratic elite that is functionally illiterate—an elite that knows how to skim the surface of everything but understands nothing in depth.

At my last job, management would always go on about using less paper in an effort to make the company more “green”. It’s a good premise and one I support. However, just saying it and encouraging it isn’t always enough. If it’s something you don’t (or can’t) dictate as a policy then you can’t enforce. Instead, you can encourage people to not waste paper by “coaching” them. The idea is to give them a friendly reminder of the benefits of not wasting paper and show them how they can potentially be more productive even without that extra print.

I wonder if they’ll start outsourcing toilet paper into the digital age as well. Would make for a cleaner, greener environment.

I like using paper to make lists and notes for my articles and my husband is an illustrator, so it’s hard to do that without actual paper. But I’m all for the convenience of being able to email myself a copy of my passport and travel documents, always paranoid I’ll end up in the likes of ‘Broke Down Palace’. I get dibs on being Kate Beckinsdale though, even though she got a roach in the ear, she also got sprung.

www.theinnovativetraveler.com

Speaking of toilet paper, I’ve never liked the idea of recycled toilet paper. The whole idea of using something that someone else has already used once before for the same purpose is a bit disturbing.

Which brings up an interesting thought…if you think about how you use paper in the traditional sense, you typically store them in groups into folders. But you also end up binding them together with paper clips. So what does everyone use as a sort of digital paper clip?

Notebook by Circus Ponies is pretty analogous to the concept of a digital paper clip. So is a zip file to some degree.

Digital media are not permanent. Even if means to recover assets from obsolete media are maintained, the media themselves are subject to loss or damage over time. Preservation of digital media depends on making and sustaining multiple copies of the asset, and making the social commitment to propagate the copying process into the future.

In twenty years, there will be few facilities capable of reading CD-ROMs. In order to be widely available in the future, today’s assets will have to be transferred to a medium current at the time in which the user lives.

Digital assets will be available only if, and for only as long as, society maintains its commitment to the transfer process. The convenient and remarkable thing about paper documents, as well as about the stone and animal hide documents that preceded them, is that they can be read by the unaided human eye for as long as the document medium exists. This will not generally be true for the digital assets of the future.

Speaking of toilet paper, I’ve never liked the idea of recycled toilet paper. The whole idea of using something that someone else has already used once before for the same purpose is a bit disturbing.

Recycled toilet paper is not made from used toilet paper! It is made from newsprint, bond, etc.; the paper you recycle in your office.

Recycled toilet paper is not made from used toilet paper! It is made from newsprint, bond, etc.; the paper you recycle in your office.

Silly man! That was a joke! LOL!

But now that you mentioned it, some people might get a kick out of wiping their arse with some of the magazines and newspapers in this country! If you want to make a political statement, that’s certainly one way to do it…and you don’t even need recycled toilet paper to do it. Amazing what some people will do to stay “green”! ;)

Hello. I have been reading this website for a while. I have struggled with storing paper records and digital records, but now I’m diving in head first and intend to eliminate all my paper documents.

Just this morning I’ve digitized and shredded bills, credit statements, investment statements, as well as a stack of Federal Reserve Notes in various denominations.

Later today I plan to proceed to some old moldy letters from George Washington and Abe Lincoln.

The simplest way to cut paper usage is to say to the staff “we spent x on paper last year, if we spend less than x this year we will share out the difference equally.

Sad but true!

Okay,

Let me chime in here, as someone who has been a “Printer Consolidation” Project Manager for a pretty large financial institution:

You can make employees print less.

It’s called not printing what won’t actually get picked up anyway.

We removed most employee printers, which often had 18+ private user bins (yes, they were spoiled users) to replace them with all-in-ones w/ no output trays.

Or, being the misplaced IT marketing type that I was, “PIN-secured virtual output trays,” as I liked to refer to them as. (Remember: problems are merely solutions without publicists).

In practice, if you have to enter your PIN or scan your employee ID before you print out anything, 50%-75% will be saved.

Why? Because 50-75% of stuff employees print out without a face-end verification is either forgotten + recycled or left lying around, for the employee’s “oh yeah, that!” moment to kick-in.

I know this as fact, because the year following my large University’s implementation of the “Scan your ID to print” stations, they reported a paper savings of roughly 75%. They expected 50%.

That basically means 75% of what students were sending to the printers were never actually picked up, both before the project and after. The only difference: If it wasn’t ‘picked-up’, it didn’t print, and trees were saved.

Sounds silly, until you actually have the hard numbers to quantify the trees. Paper costs money because trees cost money. Save money, save trees.

all that being said, are all-in-ones THAT bad? I can’t possibly believe it. $300 for a scan-only?

Can’t a decent investment in a duplex all-in-one, together with some software-based solutions, provide a comparable experience?

I can’t possibly justify a $300 scan-only offering, when there’s all-in-one lasers w/ duplex functionality for the same price.

without having to wait for some drawn-out, 3-year project to optimize printers, another way for managers, as the company at my company was directed to do, was this:

“Unless necessary (e.g., for client-facing presentations) encourage users to avoid printing.”

Translation: don’t print memo notes, slides, etc. to the board room. Keep them on your laptop. And anyone who actually prefers referring to Powerpoint slides on paper should be fired regardless. ;)

How do managers encourage this? One person says, “I see you printing out Powerpoint slides and bringing them to meetings, I’m going to sit down with you for a private chat about what else you’re ignoring.”

All of a sudden, that manager’s department will not be using as much paper, trust me.

One early winter’s night in 1869, while sitting at his kitchen table trying to order individual note cards containing data on the then known properties of chemical elements for presentation in his planned chemistry textbook, Mendeleev glanced at a random arrangement of the cards, had a sudden insight, and conceived the periodic table of elements. I doubt this would have occurred in the brave new ScanSnap world.

i think the point was, for the boring stuff… we need to refer back to when it’s tax time, etc… it’s a waste of space, a waste of time digging through/filing the stuff, etc.

I still am pro-book. But, for researching on term papers, I always did like the fact I could search + grab a bunch of PDF’s off my school library’s like 10,000 different journal article repositories, and then do searchable PDF’s later on them as my paper got more focused on a single topic…

as for to-do lists: I have to call them action lists, and use pen + paper… something about that… it’s almost like, signing your name on to it vs. rolling your eyes + typing it off.

Unrelated to this conversation, I was talking to my girlfriend last night, explaining how I have a new online backup service to supplement my local backups. I'd just helped her set up her own backup system.

I told her I'm moving to a paperless office and — good news! — I've just finished scanning and shredding all my personal letters, but not to worry, they're backed up to multiple servers with high fault tolerance.

She asked, "You shredded my letters?"

I said, "Yes, after imaging them, so don't worry; I have digital copies."

Like the queen, she was not amused. I was kidding, but that didn't help much.