Is Paper Dead?

One of the things that I’m usually talking about is ways that you can Organize Your Digital Life. This is all well and good, but it’s also a part of organizing that digital life to make sure that you clean up and clear out the physical records. These records which you very likely have on paper serve as duplicates for your digital storage space. Paper has certainly had its era, but as the move to digital has become more and more prominent we need to remember that we need to be able to clean up our processes, otherwise we will still leave a paper trail. There are so many apps and device configurations available in today’s market that keeping information on paper is impractical.

 

50 or so years ago I would say that paper and the use and storage of it was alive and kicking. Computer systems (and I use that term loosely) were capable of doing some of the functions that they were required to but on a microscopic scale of what;’s available today. They were slow, required lots of maintenance and in some cases the size of medium sized rooms. in order to have the processing power that most iPhones have nowadays a computer in the 1950’s would have to be the size of the province of Alberta, and nearly as tall. Keeping information hard copy wasn’t even considered to be a big deal. Of course, you wrote everything down on paper and kept it that way. At the time, there was no other practical way of keeping data. Keeping information on paper is something that we have done for thousands of years, so you can imagine that it would be a hard habit to break.

 

I was seeing evidence of it in my early career. In 2008 I used to work in an office where I was eventually known as “the paper nazi”. Partially because I was very clear about my views on not needing paper but also because I was in the process of actually digitizing that office. I was pitching out the paper by the bucket full in an office environment where they had e-mails printed off and put in client files (they aren’t like that anymore I should mention). I was creating processes where they would not have to print off information. In a modern office, there is really no purpose for keeping paper copies of information. With all the conveniences of technology and apps and different hardware that is available to us, there really is no point to using paper.

 

That being said I still go to meetings on a weekly basis where most if not all of the participants bring in a notebook or a pad of paper in order to take notes. I have spoken to many people about why it is that they still bring in their hard copy paper notebooks. The excuses range from “It’s habit” to “I can’t find (or think of) a better way.” Another excuse that I’ve heard was that they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) take up any new solution until their company was willing to provide it.

 

One of my readers has just made the transition to paperless and he was telling me how he couldn’t be happier with how efficient it was making him. This person, in particular, told me about how for his entire career he would take notebooks into meetings for note taking. He would do his todo lists handwritten and schedule his work life around some of the notes that he would take in his notebook.

 

He recently made a change and started writing notes in one of the various apps that you can make handwritten notes in, and he hasn’t looked back. For the longest time, the only technological disconnect was that he couldn’t find an application that did handwritten notes digitally. Once he started using the app that he’s using (not going to tell you which one for now) he hasn’t looked back. All of the uses that he used his hard copy notebook for, he is now using the app on his iPad. He also has an app so that if there are documents to be signed then he can receive the Pdf and digitally sign the document and send it back. This whole process has eliminated 90% of the paper in his life, if not more.

 

I fully believe that this type of process will become more and more the norm of how people will act. Like I said, however, getting entirely rid of Paper is a hard habit to break. it will be interesting over the next few years to see

 

With all the technology in the world and the multitude of apps available you would be forgiven for thinking that paper is really and truly dead. I, however, think that this is not strictly the case. I won’t say that paper filing is as useful as digital systems (because it’s really not) or that it should be used as a primary method for storing information. I can say, however, that there are certain (and VERY limited) circumstances where Paper can be used as a secondary backup for a digital filing system. Is paper dead? In short, no. What we need to get into more common practice is the use of digital systems over hard copy systems

 

 

Do you use Paper more than Digital Systems? What would get out to change?