There are a lot of great reasons to transform your office into a paperless place of work. Some want to "go green" for the sake of the environment, while others simply need to get better organized, and having mountains of paper is at odds with that goal. Most people, even if they haven't yet thought about it, would agree that being more "green" and more organized are both good things to work towards.
Small offices are some of the most wasteful place in terms of using paper. Even in the Internet era and with widespread email use, it seems that paper use is only increasing. That has a lot to do with easier means of printing what you produce on your computer.
So the first thing that has to change is the mindset. I am not talking about some ideological shift, but rather a shift in operating procedures throughout the day.
For instance, there is no need to print out your emails for archiving when your hard drive or any number of online services can do it digitally. Don't send office memos when an online instant messenger can accomplish the same task faster and with no paper involved. Even faxes no longer need to be sent on paper with the advent of online fax services.
Most importantly in terms of altering your mindset is doing all your proof reading on your computer. Sometimes things do need to be printed out to be presented to someone or carried along for a meeting. But most people have the bad habit of doing their proof reading on printed copies... over and over again. Instead, proof read on your computer and only print the final draft.
Now that the mindset issue is out of the way, what do you need to effectively go paperless?
There are lots of gadgets and programs that can streamline your paperless office, but only two things are really needed: digital storage space and a good scanner.
Make sure you are using computers with large hard drives, or purchase some good, beefy external hard drives to save all your documents. You will be surprised how inexpensive they are in comparison to the huge quantities of office paper consumed each year.
For a scanner, the best idea is to get one with duplex functionality, a large feeder tray and a processing speed of at least 20 pages per minute (PPM). One of the ideas of going paperless is to reduce the manpower needed to process documents and information, and that won't happen if you are having to hand-feed pages into an inadequate scanner.
That's about it. Going paperless and really improving your work environment is really not a difficult task, but it does require a determination to get started and complete the task.
