At my day job, I’m on a committee that organizes an annual conference. Yesterday prior to our meeting we were e-mailed three documents that would be discussed. I printed them out, took them to the meeting, made a few notes on my notepad, then tossed them in the recycle bin when I got back to my office. The total life cycle for those two dozen pieces of paper was less than three hours.
It must have been close to 15 years ago that I first heard the terms “paperless office”. In the last decade, e-mail has certainly transformed the way we share information and all but eliminated the snowstorm of memos that used to clog company mailrooms. At the same time, personal laser printers have made creating paper documents even easier. There has to be another way.
Well, as I felt a twinge of guilt at recycling those documents instead of carefully filing them away in a manila folder (never to again see the light of day), I certainly wished for my dream e-book reader. In addition to those printed documents, I also took to the meeting a leather pad-folio– a full size paper pad in a leather portfolio. Instead, wouldn’t it have been nice to beam the documents to an e-book device the same size as that pad-folio? Something the same thickness as the Sony Reader, but with enough screen real estate to display an 8.5×11 document at maybe 85-90% real size? Something as lightweight as a paper pad, protected in a leather portfolio? Something that could hold hundreds of documents, and beam new editions to the other committee members on the spot? Then when I returned to the office, I could have deleted the files from my reader, confident that I could upload them again from my desktop should I ever need them again.
One day, in the next five years, I think the technology will finally be here. Then the paperless office might actually have a chance at becoming more than just a catch-phrase.
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