Someone once recommended that many firms could go 100% paperless in an effort to go green.  You can do a lot of things with computers, but is going paperless possible?  I plan on giving it a shot for Spring 2009.

The Parameters

Going 100% paperless might be possible if the entire community is committed to going paperless. Otherwise, it would be impossible-there would be no interface with paper-dependent people. For this project I will go reasonably paperless.  Here are a few exceptions that I have to acknowledge:

1. Deliverables – Some professors will accept email homeworks-most will not.
2. Notation issues – The econometrics course I have next semester is a very math intense course with a lot of equations and symbols. My mac is not equipped with a tablet, so paper notes may be necessary.
3. Hand-Outs – I can not NOT accept hand outs because I am going paperless.
4. Books – If this was about replacing books, I think I would have campus-wide support.

Paper in ’08

So why are there stacks of paper in my bag right now? Some of the things you would find:

• Notes
• Handouts and Syllabi
• Deliverables – Homework, Test, and Quizzes
• Sudoku puzzles

Is all of this necessary?

The Logistics

My fancy macbook is going to be key in making this work.  Notes and class power points can be accessed from the internet – as opposed to being printed.  This alone eliminate the bulk of anything that I would ever print. A portable document scanner should be able to take care of hand-written notes and handouts-I’ll have to purchase one of those.  My goal is to proactively scan and recycle paper handouts within the hour that they are issued.  Once a document is scanned I would not need the physical copy anymore, would I?  Ideally, I will only ever carry a few sheets of blank paper with me and my mac.

The issues

We are talking about going paperless in a paper-dependent world. As long as paper is the standard I will have to do the extra work to interface with the others.  Most of my professors will not make an exception to allow email assignments-even if they already require them to be typed.. It seems that people  still have a fascination with printed pages. Am I missing something that explains why this would not work?

The point

Putting it into perspective, I am taking the next step to working with less paper.  As of right now, there are stacks of paper in my bag and it would be almost impossible to find the one I needed–if i did need it.  Those stacks of paper are not part of any filing system so going paperless will certainly make me more organized.  It is much easier to organize data digitally than it is physically and this is a real benefit.

This project is about integrating technology in our lives–again.  The technology I will be using has been available–and functionally practical–for the last 5+ years, yet there has been no attempt to seriously integrate these devices into our daily operations.  People resist change, but is this not excessive? I will be looking for solutions to these questions through-out the duration of this project.