Tips for the paperless office

- Occasionally, people who go through my Time Management Fundamentals course ask me about the paperless office. Will this work with a paperless office? How do I create a paperless office? If this is something that interests you, I recommend looking at a course here on the library titled Going Paperless: Start to Finish. That will walk you through the whole concept of how to set this up. In this video, I don't want to replace what's done there, but, rather, just offer my perspective, which may be a bit unique.

After having taught principles of organization for many years, both one-on-one and online, I've not become an advocate for the paperless office. It's not that there's anything wrong with it. There can be some benefit to streamlining and getting rid of the clutter. Yet, all too often, I find that a person's desire to have no paper at all in their office, in reality, creates slower productivity and more confusion in the office. My perspective is that of trying to help people be more productive, to focus on the things that are most valuable, and to take action.

When it comes to time management, the result is more important than anything else. If a system, like setting up a paperless office, gets in the way of achieving the result, then I discourage people from trying to implement it. Being organized is not in and of itself a virtue. Being productive is. That said, I recognize that some people are big fans of having a paperless office. If that's the situation you're in, then let's focus on one thing.

At what point in your system should something that is paper be converted to something that is digital? In Time Management Fundamentals, I talk about the importance of processing on a weekly basis. Processing is responding to three questions when you pick up an item from your inbox, such as an important paper. The questions are: what is the next step, meaning what is the next action I'll take? When will it be done, meaning when will I schedule time in my calendar to work on it? And where is its home, meaning where is its final storage place? Some people try to insert the act of converting something that is paper into something digital before all of these questions are asked.

Whenever new paper comes in, they scan it into a scanner, which automatically puts it into a folder. The problem with putting scanning before processing is that keeping that paper might be unnecessary. Also, scanning paper before processing essentially creates a new gathering point. You've moved something from a physical inbox to a digital inbox that you are now going to have to check in addition to everything else. And the more gathering points we have, the less efficient we're going to become.

So instead of scanning items first, I move the step of scanning to where it belongs, which is right after the where is its home question. So I pick up a paper and first process it. I ask, what is the next step? And maybe I say the next step is that I need to draft a response. When will it be done? I schedule a time to do that in my calender, on Tuesday at one o'clock. Then I ask myself, where is its home? And now the answer is scan it.

And I put that into my paperless office filing system. In this way, processing takes precedence over paperless, which is its proper place.