Posts I’ve been working at Curtin University for a week now.
On my way from the carpark on my first day, I tweeted that I had just heard a segment about the whether the ”paperless office” fulfilled its promise on ABC Radio National’s Future Tense . In response, Michael Rees from Bond University shared that night his experience with cleaning out 19 years worth of contents in his university office, A Major Step Closer to a Paperless Office. He discarded…
…About 8 bookshelf metres of conference proceedings, box files and the usual stuff in ring binders including lots of overhead slides from the 1970s and 1980s all bit the dust. 9 full filing cabinet drawers were reduced to 0.25 of a drawer – that was all I had actually looked at in the last 12 months. 23 old conference bags were reduced to 2. Out of over 100 optical disks about 3 survived. I kept 1 USB headset/mic and discarded a dozen or more old analogue headsets, mics and speakers. It feels wonderful. [For those wondering I discarded all my printed journals 2 or 3 years ago.]
Consequently I don’t feel too bad about the inheritance that will share my space until we move buildings at the end of the year. It’s a decade worth of the Tuesday IT Section of the Australian newspaper. Only half of the collection fit into the photo.
I was asked whether I wanted to continue adding to the collection. “Why not”, I thought, “obviously it was valued and it would be a pity to stop it now”. For about 5 seconds… before I asked myself whether I would have chosen it as essential for my office if it wasn’t there already…
As the author of the book series Kiplinger’s Taming the Paper Tiger, I have been helping people organize their paper for 30+ years, and have watched as it became more and more difficult for individuals and organizations to do for a variety of reasons including:
Ever-changing legal guidelines
1) Increased information
2) Increased workload
3) Decreased workforce
4) Highly transitional workforce
5) Highly mobile workforce
6) Decreased space
7) 24/7 expectations
As a result, we have moved toward Almost Paperless™– recognizing that “paperless” is impossible in some instances. Although technology has come a long way, some things are just better in paper format at this point. Not all organizations have the budget to purchase the equipment (not just a scanner, but an OCR scanner for example, and multiple computer monitors). The change to paperless requires extensive cooperation between management and staff, and time and training to implement the process. However, that doesn’t mean that every organization shouldn’t get started on the road to paperless! One great way to “jumpstart” the process is what we call a “Productive Environment Day™. If you ask any 100 employees if they knew there were things in their office they could get rid of, 99 would say “Yes!” but most don’t take the time to do it. So we turn it into an “event” using an 18-point checklist we have developed through the years. At a recent series of Productive Environment days in a company with 400 people, we averaged recycling one ton of paper every two hours!