Three Steps To Paperless Office
1. Think Before You Ink. The change has to start here. We all have to change how we look at paper. Before you print out anything, ask yourself if it is absolutely necessary. If you have a digital copy of that e-mail, why do you need a printed version? The green blog TreeHugger.com tried to build an eco-meme by asking people to add this line to their e-mail signatures: “Eco-Tip: Printing e-mails is usually a waste.”
2. Preview Your Documents. The average employee prints six totally useless pages per day. All you have to do is walk over to the network printer in your office to see examples of them. I did just that and found a tray filled with blank pages, misplaced spreadsheet fields, and random HTML fields from printed Web pages. The average employee prints 1,410 of these wasted pages per year. And this problem is easy to fix: Just preview it first. The easiest way to do this is to use the print preview feature in whatever software you are using to print.
3. Print to PDF. It took a while, but PDF truly is a universal portable document format. And just attaching a Word doc to an e-mail is pretty universal too (although I have it on very good authority that there are still those among us stuck using Word 2002 and unable to natively read the latest Office formats). Send digital files whenever you can.
There are more ways to cut back, of course, including printing on both sides of pages, electronic invoicing, and using multifunction devices to scan rather than copy, but those three steps alone could put a huge dent in paper waste.
Photo by LotusHead.
Dana Keith on May 10th, 2008 1:38 am
Yes this is really necessary, everyone must know about these information..
Not just to minimize the number of useless pages each day, but more on conserving papers that must have been used for other important printable pages.
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