Paperless Office

Many of you will have heard me going on about the amount of printing we do here at Hagley. You may also have heard me talking about trying to achieve the 'paperless office'. Is a paperless office achievable ? Well, if I am honest the answer is no BUT a near paperless office is achievable for many of us and for others the possibility is there to reduce the piles of paper.

A few years ago I worked for a government agency in UK and was receiving masses of documents to read. These documents were everything from large project documents (upto 200 pages each), minutes of meetings, agenda of meetings, project calendars etc etc. After a while it seemed ridiculous to me that I always had my laptop with me which I could use to bring all relevant documentation with me. Added to this is the fact that I am a hopeless filer of paper and could never actually find anything. The search facilities on the laptop allowed me to find anything really quickly. In addition, I could comment on the document, take notes etc without ever having to transpose my notes into a digital form.

Thus, I decided to do something about it. Below are a few short points of how I went about it.

1. I taught myself to read from the screen. This didn't come naturally to me. I had to start with a personal rule that if something was sent to me via e.g. email I wouldn't print it if it was 2 pages or less. After a few weeks I increased this to 5 pages and so on.

2. I asked people for soft copies (i.e. via email or access to the document online) and didn't accept the printed copy they may have provided.

3. I only ever gave people soft copies (i.e. not printed) of documents. If they wanted to print it then that was up to them but at least I had done my bit.

4. I brought my laptop to meetings. I had been provided with a laptop so why was my agency also having to pay for unnecessary printing as well?

5. If I wanted to share a document at e.g. at a meeting before sending it out then I used a projector to display to all


Whilst writing this at Hagley I look at my desk and shelves and see I have a few invoices to sign, a few pieces of marketing material and a few post-it notes. I haven't printed any of them. Most are unavoidable currently (e.g. invoices) or received via post (I didn't ask for any of those!)

I still print a few things but the list is now very small. For example, I still find it hard to make notes and play around with figures for budgets without a piece of paper in front of me.

So, give it a try! It really can work.