Paper

So much for the paperless office. For the last week or so, in between my other usual tasks, I’ve been spending time tidying my office, and in the process have filled one whole 120 litre paper recycling bin, and am halfway through a second bin. I feel like I’m drowning in paper!

It’s so wasteful, and lest you think I’ve been responsible for creating every single sheet of that paper – printing each sheet out for myself – much of this paper was from meetings I attended, agendas, minutes, and assorted documents, all printed for members of the various committees. In my job I have the task of attending numerous committee meetings – teaching and learning, research and development, school board, collection development, team – they all generate paper.

Every time I do my annual tidy up, I ponder this waste, and wonder whether I should insist on just getting my meeting papers electronically, and bring the agendas with me on my PDA. I’m sure I would still collect a certain amount of paper from the documents that are tabled at meetings, but this would still cut down on the amount of paper quite significantly. The only problem with this is that I would be the only one who asks for the documents electronically, so the secretaries would have to remember to send them to me, instead of printing them out as they would for everyone else. (I’m not sure they would be happy about this, as I think it would be an extra task for them. Printing the agendas, on the other hand, would be routine – just set the photocopier to print, collate and staple twenty copies.)

I shouldn’t give the impression that I’m merely a passive receiver of paper. While much of the paper is meeting fodder, quite a lot of the paper that gets discarded is paper I’ve printed myself. Even if I can’t get the secretaries to stop giving me hard copy, I really ought to start with myself, and consider whether I really need every single thing I send to the printer. I seem to have a penchant for printing journal articles to read later. That’s my excuse, but printing the articles off seems to allow me to procrastinate and the actual reading may or may not happen. In the process I end up with yet more paper. The other excuse I make is that if I have the hard copy of the article I can annotate it – and yet, if I am honest with myself, very rarely do I actually annotate anything I read. Saving said articles on my thumb drive would probably be a better option – I don’t have any problems with reading things onscreen, and filling my thumb drive to capacity would be a good reminder that I haven’t read all those articles yet!

I also need to get over my impulse to Save-Things-Just-In-Case. This is how I end up with three or four year old documents that I couldn’t discard at the time, for whatever reason, and which I never ever look at or even remember the existence of.

The next thing I need to do is to resurrect my PDA. I stopped using it because it was playing up – occasionally the screen wouldn’t respond, or the whole thing would freeze – but I didn’t really investigate to see if there was something I could do to improve its performance.