I’m a techno-lumberjack and I’m OK…
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Data Protection, Blog, Printers on
Guilty as charged. I print hardcopy of important documents so they do not get lost, so that I can keep them safe, so that I can easily share them with anyone who might need to see them. And it appears that I am not alone in participating in this retro-archiving activity, despite my high tech background, as a new report from the EMC Corporation suggests British business is printing so much stuff that it is costing around £11 billion per year.
In the poll of 500 office workers across the UK, KRC Research discovered that people spend 52 minutes every day searching for ‘lost’ emails and assorted electronic documents with those in the South East being most likely to waste more time hunting down the elusive information that is hidden somewhere within the network.
Move towards my neck of the woods, the North of England, and office workers seem concerned with reducing the amount of paper used during the working day. Yet workers aged 18-34 are printing out an incredible 100 pages worth of paper documentation each and every day on average. Makes my 10-20 sheets of A4 look positively green by comparison.
Talking of which, the same survey also revealed that 81% of office workers want their employers to do more for the environment, and the same number have a personal desire to reduce their carbon footprint in the office.
Nice to know that I am not alone in being totally screwed up when it comes to balancing environmental concerns with the day to day reality of office survival. Makes me feel a little better to realize that I am not the only person who understands IT systems, and knows how to archive documents securely, but who still resorts to good old fashioned comfort food of information technology: printouts…
Rated: 73.33% (3 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Dan Jones - May 19, 2008 on 12:35 pm
Annoyingly some compliance activities where I work in Insurance require all correspondance, emails etc to be hardcopied to the *paper* files. I believe its a requirement of some of the markets the company works with.
I go for the middle-green approach in my personal life. I have a NAS box (homebuilt - see blog here) which has RAID, which holds all my documents. Moreso, it offsite copies changes (using rsync) to them to a non-raid documentstore at the other side of the country every night while I sleep - I can retrieve documents from here, etc via scp/sftp if necessary from anywhere if the main NAS does die. I do still however hardprint all financial records/contracts, plane e-tickets etc as they arrive. In fact I have only printed 60 a4 sheets this year so far of this nature.
I feel the above is the best balance.
P.S I still need large printouts when working on complex code for annotations sometimes - I have a dot matrix still for this!
Comment by Nick Kotarski - May 20, 2008 on 2:13 pm
Personally I find myself buying technical books and then not reading them.
In years gone past I would carefully print articles, for future reference, put them in a folder and, mostly, never look at them again.
It’s a bit like videoing TV programmes and then not actually watching them and collecting magazine articles (because they look interesting) and not reading them. One wants not to lose track of some snippet of information but never follow it up.
Since I discovered OneNote I only rarely print stuff out now.
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