Reduce Your Paper-work, Save a Tree!
Go Paperless. The New York Times reports that families are going paperless far faster than businesses; families have to pay the price of ink jet cartridges.
Minimizing the volume of paper you use makes you more efficient at work and helps the environment by reducing demand. Plus, with less paper to manage you will have less filing – and you won’t need to rummage through your desk drawers looking for that piece of paper!
If the dream of a paperless office is just that – a dream, you can easily reduce the amount of paper you use. Here are some great tips
- Shrink your page margins to 0.75 inches (1.8cm) or less – you will fit more words per page so you will use fewer pages.
- Print on both the fronts and backs of sheets whenever you can.
- For word processing, choose a font designated as narrow or condensed, so you will fit more words on one page. Alternatively, choose Tahoma or Segoe UI fonts to fit more words on your pages,
- Keep your headers and footers as small as possible, since extra white space tends to crop up there.
- If you’re printing a spreadsheet, select only the cells you need on the page, then choose Print Selection instead of printing your whole document.
- Instead of jotting down random notes during phone calls on a pad or on post-its, try a re-usable solution such as a chalkboard or whiteboard. Alternately, just type your notes during calls into a word processing document. Not only will you save paper, you’ll find it easier to search for the info you need later on.
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Paper wasted When you’re going to meetings and conferences, avoid having to print out directions by sending them straight to your mobile device if you’ve got one.
- In general, try to send emails instead of physical letters, memos, or faxes. When you’ve got to get a fax out, or someone wants to send you one, try an online fax solution instead of a fax machine.
- Use online billing for your professional accounts with electronically-submitted invoices and direct deposit payments.
- If you work with a project team, don’t print memo after memo after memo and draft after draft – keep your shared documents online. Post what you’re all working on through a collaboration site like Zoho or Google Docs, then log on and see the latest version on the internet.
- Investing in a scanner lets you shred documents (reuse them as packaging materials) and navigate them as searchable PDFs.
- If you regularly need to print from the web, try to cut back; these downloadable software programs let you print just what you need from websites (without all the extra formatting, advertisements and images).
GreenPrint (free and paid)
This handy software digitally reads and omits wasted pages that have useless text and images like URLs, banner ads, disclaimers, and extra signature lines on emails. On top of saving trees, GreenPrint says the program can save as much as $90 and 1,400 wasted pages per year for the average user. The home edition of GreenPrint is available for free to users and nonprofits, but has the catch of printing a banner on your pages. The premium edition is $29, and is faster and ad-free.
HP Smart Web Printing (free)
This software is a free add-on for Internet Explorer. It allows a user to grab content from the web and put it on a clipboard for organization and well-formatted printing. The process is a bit more involved than the other programs we’ve mentioned, but is great for gathering content from multiple web pages and condensing it into a single document. The content can then be formatted to look exactly how you want it for concise printing, and can even be turned into a PDF.
Implement these easy tips, and you will dramatically reduce the amount of paper you use. Save a tree (or a forest!).
More? Common problems for home offices – and their solutions.
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Going paperless definately saves money and more importantly saves a tree. A home office is a great place to plot ideas and I never print anything but the final copy. Well… what I believe will be the final copy. Otherwise we are all well equipped to cary digital data for the most part.
I expected nothing less from GWAC! 🙂
My company doesn’t have a clue about paper wastage . We are forever printing material that doesn’t need printing . We recycle the paper , but are still wasting ink from the printers . We have just had dimmers fitted to cut lighting by 20% . We have movement detectors fitted in rooms to turn lights off after a certain amount of time if no movement is detected . But ….. we still waste paper …..go figure .
Yes, that is SO frustrating! I’m pleased your company is reducing its costs and and footprint on the lighting front though. It’s all too common that companies will opt for changes which are automatically taken care of by someone / something else (in this case, the dimmer switches and motion sensors), but shy away from requesting changes that can only be done by humans (reducing paper use). Hopefully the lighting is just the start of some more improvements! Thanks for your comments John!
We are in a constant battle of eliminating paper use. We always ask people for emails, online payments and direct transfers. I believe if people can participate in these kinds of things a lot of trees can be saved!
Jsut saw an interesting article, families are leading the way in going paperless over businesses. The cause, the sky-high price of ink-jet refills/replacement. Thanks for the tips, some old hat, and some more impressive ideas.
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