I swear I have no beef with Paper

One of the things that I have always had to contend with was how people use paper in the workplace. I’ve had issues with paper for a long time. Not so much because people use paper but because people tend to store it when they’re done and never look at it again. I honestly have no issue with people using paper on a day to day basis. The issue that gives me a brain cramp and a bit of an eye twitch is when I am told that they need to keep the documents that they have been working with, or more over keep multiple versions of the hard copy document that they’ve been working with.

 

I genuinely do not understand the need to keep multiple copies of the same document in hard copy format. Back in the 1970’s it may have looked good if you had loads of paper on your desk it meant you were busy right? Nowadays if you have loads and loads of paper on your desk it makes you look messy and disorganized. If you can’t figure out how to keep things organized on your desk then you start looking bad. Like I said a few weeks ago in 5 Steps to get your Desktop and Cloud working together (hyperlink) one of the best things we can do to save ourselves time is to save our documents to the cloud. In today’s working environment (and by extension at home) It’s important to keep yourself organized, and the easiest way to do that is to ditch the hardcopy.

 

If you are someone who relies heavily on paper, hear me out. Years ago in a galaxy far far away, I used to be someone who kept everything hard copy. As a writer, one of the things that I did was print off drafts of stories that I would write and when I had marked them up and input the changes to the story on my computer, I would put the hard copy in my closet. I did this for years and would have draft after draft of these stories that I would write, which would take up half my closet space. I really do get the need to want to keep copies of your drafts. The problem is that Once I started scanning all my documents a few years ago Not only did I have more space in my closet, but I was also able to access all the information that I had stored in a much more comprehensive manner.

 

Since then I have developed a couple of strategies in order to make sure that I had only one copy of a document at all times and to make sure that the copy that I had was the most recent;

 

1. Use date formatting to differentiate versions – This is one of the easiest ways to differentiate between different copies of the same document. This is one I use on a regular basis because (Certainly in my personal life) I deal with a lot of hard copy documents (receipts and whatnot) which would have roughly the same descriptive name (ex. grocery store 24.50) so in order to have multiples you should put the date in front to differentiate between documents. If you save a document on June the 5th, for example, I would call it “2018-06-05 – Document” to differentiate it from the copy you saved of that same document you saved on April 24th which would have been called “2018-04-24 – Document”. The added bonus is that if your date all your documents they will get automatically sorted. Most computers will auto sort your documents by name and if you name your document with a number sequence (like the date) it will organize it for you.

 

2. Only keep copies of a document while you’re working on it – If you really NEED to print something off, I would highly recommend only keeping it hard copy while you are working on it. If you want to make changes or notes I totally get that, but when you are done inputting the changes, having the copy serves no purpose. For this, I would recommend scanning the copy that you are done with. That way you still have all your versions, all the changes you made, but it’s not taking up space on your desk.

 

3.  Only keep the latest version hard copy – I certainly go through drafts of documents all the time, but one of the things that I have always tried to do is (assuming I needed it) only keep the most recent copy of a document on my desk. Keeping multiple copies of a document, certainly in hard copy, has always been something that has confused me. If you’re going to make changes to a document (certainly in my head) you don’t want to have old data sitting there on your desk for you or someone else to misinterpret. If you just have one copy then you know which one you need to be working with. If you need to reference older copies then you should have the scanned copies in your digital filing system

 

Seriously, I have no issue with Paper. Certainly with the USE of paper. If you are able to maintain a digital system then there is really no reason to keep anything hard copy anymore. Certainly not copies of copies of documents. For me, the much simpler solution would be keeping the drafts of your documents in your cloud account, or even on your computer. Paper takes up so much bulk and space and there are so many more efficient ways to keep your information that it seems inefficient to try and keep documents there.

 

Do you like to use paper? Do you keep lots of copies of things?