
Paperless Office? screw it - sircausticsoda
http://kissflow.com/process_playbook/screw-the-idea-of-a-paperless-office
======
buro9
We've been paperless since the start.

This doesn't mean we do not keep paper, but every receipt, bank statement, and
contract gets scanned ( [http://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-Instant-Sheet-
Fed-Sca...](http://www.amazon.com/Fujitsu-ScanSnap-Instant-Sheet-Fed-
Scanner/dp/B001V9LQH0/) ) and goes into Google Drive.

When scanned we enable the OCR feature so that every item is searchable in
Google Drive.

We use the permissions management of Drive to ensure that our accountants can
see our bank statements, that our lawyers can see our contracts, and that our
staff can each see their HR folder.

The only paper we keep physical copies of are bank statements, receipts and
contracts. But as these never need to be accessed unless a dispute or audit
requires it, and as they can be found far easier in GDrive, we archive
chronologically for storage efficiency and security rather than retrieval
efficiency and convenience. Basically... it takes very little space and is
stored off-site.

I can't actually imagine running a business any other way.

Now if we can just find something as efficient as a pad on the desk for making
temporary notes we'd deal with that last 1%.

Our next goal: Reduce email usage and find collaboration tools that offer
better workflow and increased intra-company transparency.

~~~
sneak
Bank statements, receipts, and contracts are just as legitimate in digital
form. Paper copies are not required.

Please feel free to go all the way.

~~~
buro9
In the UK?

I'm tempted to go all of the way, but would kick myself hard if I did anything
today for convenience that might create risk down the road.

Archiving the paper is a very minimal cost to pay to ensure we don't create
that risk.

I should also add, we use grive
[https://github.com/Grive/grive](https://github.com/Grive/grive) to sync the
entire contents of Google Drive to a local machine and then Tarsnap
[http://www.tarsnap.com/](http://www.tarsnap.com/) to backup that.

We can use that to verify the state of Google Drive over time as well as to
restore should anything ever happen to our Google Drive account (those well-
documented instances of people getting locked out of their accounts).

------
scotth
What in the world are they doing with scroll behaviour? Stop it.

~~~
aldarn
I liked it so much i copied the JS for my own site :)

~~~
Geee
This scrolling is horrible on devices that already implement momentum
scrolling (mac).

~~~
throwscroll123
I can't imagine how horrible it must be on there. I have a Logitech MX (free-
wheel mouse) and smooth scrolling enabled. I'm still dizzy.

------
Karunamon
In my experience, paperless doesn't work unless you also eliminate/greatly
downscale your printer (no more hundred-page-per-minute behemoth, trade that
in for a slow $50 inkjet MFP from the local department store, and spend the
year's maintenance budget on tablets for all) because people still have that
ingrained habit of printing all the things.

That way, you can still print/fax if you _need_ to, but now there's an
opportunity cost to it. Using the computer is now unambiguously quicker.

And if everyone is "distracted" during a meeting due to tablets, you should
probably be asking yourself if the meeting is essential to have. Is whatever
topic you're discussing really worth having X people paid Y per hour drop
everything they're doing to hash something out that couldn't be done over IM
or email? (I find this tack works great with convincing higher-level
management who think in dollars and cents)

------
_delirium
_...digitizing is a boon, make your smart move and switch to Google Drive or
Dropbox. Now the good part about this is, you can have all of your gazzlion
files on the cloud and access them from anywhere. The better part is you can
have all of them indexed!_

For ephemeral stuff this is fine, but I'd be really wary of this "digitization
solution" for data that matters and what you might want to find some years
down the road. This kind of ad-hoc digitization has caused a lot of problems,
from documents that simply don't exist anymore, to documents that might exist
somewhere but not anywhere anyone can find them. Paper isn't a great solution,
but most of the stuff I've actually lost has been digitized stuff on some
server or service that disappeared. If you're a bigger company in particular,
I'd treat it as an archival problem worth having a proper solution for
(perhaps even an in-house archivist whose actual job is managing it).

Vaguely relevant, a cautionary tale that was making the rounds a few years
ago: [http://wrttn.in/04af1a](http://wrttn.in/04af1a)

------
king_magic
I work in an office where actual use of paper is very much in the minority. So
much so that when someone actually hands me a piece of paper, my first thought
is "well now what do I do with this thing? Isn't this on our (insert share
mechanism here)?".

It just evolved to be that way, I don't know of any single decision point
where we said nope, done with paper. Obviously won't work for every type of
organization, but I'm quite happy not having to deal with physical paper.
Feels very... quaint.. to have to do so - like staying at a B&B without, say,
electricity, where you must churn your own butter.

Now all that said, there is one huge downside to this type of office -
everyone looks at their laptops or tablets in meetings. People are constantly
distracted. I haven't been in a meeting in months where everyone is focused
(though I can't say that was true of paperful offices either). Is it
better/worse? I don't know, but if I had to pick between the two, I'd pick no
paper every time.

~~~
VLM
"everyone looks at their laptops or tablets in meetings."

Trust me when I say most of the people pretending to stare at old fashioned
paper are spacing out, thinking about the weekend, shopping lists,
daydreaming, etc.

Its not more distracted, its more honest. This is a prime opportunity to
improve business procedures and make more money. If its possible to be honest
that most meetings are a waste of time, abolish them.

I've spent a lot of time at primate dominance rituals, at slow verbal readings
of a previously distributed email/powerpoint, at what amounts to a dramatic
presentation with poor stagecraft that should have been done by distributing a
professionally edited video, the worlds least efficient way to distribute work
material, a very inefficient and expensive way to ensure boring forms are
filled out (too beta/lazy to enforce your workers actually work? make them
work in a conference room and call it a meeting). I've been to a couple real
meetings in my life, mostly brainstorming sessions, but the rest have been a
waste of time.

What we need is a meetingless office not a paperless office. Its trivial to
waste $10000 worth of aggregate labor and travel budget for a meeting, but
really hard to blow $10000 worth of paper in an hour unless you've got a
printing press instead of a stereotypical laser printer.

~~~
king_magic
| Its not more distracted, its more honest.

In my experience, it is more distracted. When someone is deep in the mental
zone of authoring an email, or caught up in an IM chat, and I just need to ask
them if they agree with a technical decision or not, they are definitely too
distracted to be effective.

| Trust me when I say most of the people pretending to stare at old fashioned
paper are spacing out, thinking about the weekend, shopping lists,
daydreaming, etc.

Yes, that is definitely human nature - but it's far easier (IMO) to get
someone's attention from a daydream than it is from a screen of blinking
notifications.

| What we need is a meetingless office not a paperless office.

I disagree. There are times and places for meetings. Sure, frequent meetings
are painful and need to be culled back, but there are just times that you need
to sit down with real people and talk through something.

------
bulibuta
I'm sorry to break the eco-parade, but this just doesn't fit with my work. At
all.

I wouldn't put my company's documents in the cloud. Google, are you kidding
me? Then again most of my work is security orientated. So my experience might
differ.

Second, as a developer, I wouldn't give-up pen and paper for doing mathematics
and for doodling algorithms and attempts at solving daily problems. I tried to
do it on the computer a lot of times but it's just a waste of time and I
always end-up focusing on the tools rather on the problem at hand.

From my experience these paperless speeches come from SUV drivers that read
about it in this months Corporate Magazine's issue.

Now, unleash the downvotes!

~~~
josefresco
Let's hope your office is secure since your security model relies on
preventing physical access.

Your point about focusing too much on the tools when going digital is
important. Often I get sucked into some fancy _ToDo app_ for my short lists of
personal tasks. Down I go into the rabbit hole of productivity apps and soon
enough I realize I should have just scribbled it on a piece of paper and be
done with it instead of buying into a whole ecosystem of digital tools to
manage tasks that will be thought of, recorded and completed in minutes or
hours.

~~~
bulibuta
> Let's hope your office is secure since your security model relies on
> preventing physical access.

It doesn't have to be physical. I can just store documents on a server that I
own and have control over. That still doesn't make it secure because I have to
watchout for 0-days and what not. And even then it wouldn't be secure.

But at least I have controllability and observability. I can access and modify
them anytime I want to and I also know when someone had unauthorized access to
them.

Of course this is not entirely true in Mission Impossible like scenarios. And
I'm not saying everyone should do what I do.

But I profundly dislike the superior attitude in articles such as these where
the author tells me what to do and asks me why I'm not doing it yet.

------
coldtea
> _It irks me, we’ve been listening to this for the last many decades and
> still continue to look at it as a dream. Why is your office not a paperless
> one yet? Where did it go wrong? Does it not seem absurd when we have been
> able to get our ride on Mars and yet we’ve no effective solution to make our
> offices paperless?_

Not sure what he means. My office, as most I know nowadays, are already 99%
paperless. The only paper around is some scratchpad I like to scribble ideas
on.

Now if you work in accounting (with all receipts and stuff) or in law this
might be different, but for the regular office, and especially IT? We're
there.

~~~
dded
I have no reason to doubt that you're there. But trust me, we're not all
there. There's no way an office of our size could go through the paper we do
without printers and copiers (unless we were all flat-out copy typists). This
has been true wherever I've worked.

------
carlob
This website will not load with ghostery on. I have played with the settings a
little bit and it seems that the blocking script is google analytics. I hope
this thing does not become a trend.

~~~
tech-no-logical
the site won't even show it's content without javascript. probably because of
the wordpress theme they use...

------
josefresco
Paper or no paper is not the real problem. It's to archive* or _not to
archive_ that is the issue with most.

From my experience running a web design and development company is that paper
files a lot like email archives are kept but not accessed. I have 1 drawer
filled with paper files related to a handful of my clients, and I can't say I
access them enough to warrant keeping or even scanning them (akin to moving
your paper files to a storage locker). Mostly they become paper "todos" which
need to be kept so I can address them later.

I had the same experience when I moved from Thunderbird to GMail. At first I
was concerned I wouldn't have easy access to my dozens and dozens of archived
email folders, diligently filled with all client emails from the past 5+
years. Fast forward to 3 months of using Gmail and I can count on one hand the
number of times I booted up Thunderbird to find an old email.

Papers, notes, files and (even)digital archives are safety blankets, future
tasks and baggage weighing us down and keeping us from the important work at
hand.

Don't go paperless, go archive-less.

------
VLM
Also eliminate the FAX. I haven't had access to one for a couple years but my
VOIP provider needs it to make account changes (pure WTF there) and my legacy
insurer accepts claims over FAX (which are then expensively data entered by
hand... somebody should tell them about that new fangled "CGI webform" thing
from the 90s)

(edited to add my wife had some stock brokerage thing that needed faxing, and
we discovered the hard way there's predatory faxing "services" out there which
will send your fax... for $1 a page, and of course the idiot form is 20 pages
long, so there goes $10 vs a couple cents if we mailed it)

~~~
dded
IANAL, etc., but I believe there's lot's of good legal precedent around the
legitimacy of FAX, and a lot of doubt and uncertainty about other electronic
transfers of documents. So FAX is the safe choice.

~~~
VLM
The comedic part is how out of date technologically that is. I was going to
scan the account update form, edit it on the computer including cut and paste
my signature in, then hook up an old fashioned modem to send the tiff just
like I used to send FAXes in the 90s. But I couldn't find an analog line and
working modem so I ended up emailing them the heavily edited scan, which they
accepted.

In the heyday of modems perhaps 20 years ago, this was "normal" if you already
had a scanner, you could send faxes using most higher end modems, like 14.4
and faster. So this has been technologically obsolete as an authentication
system for a couple decades.

I believe the belief comes from the bad old days of itemized long distance
billing. AT&T will send a bill to me proving I sent "something" to them so if
they claim I didn't, then produce what they claim I sent. Sorta registered
mail service, kind of. But itemized long distance billing is dead.

For HN readers too young to know what itemized long distance billing is,
before the modern era of "all minutes are free" you'd seriously, no kidding,
get a paper bill listing all your interLATA phone calls and what they cost.

Wash DC 202 123-4567 5 minutes daytime rate subtotal $10

The kind of thing seen above.

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sbarysiuk
It makes sense if it fits your workflow. We're using Google Docs and are
pretty happy with it. For signing we're using PandaDoc
([https://www.pandadoc.com](https://www.pandadoc.com)) and it saves a lot of
time as well. It's really hard to imagine that I'm doing printing, signing and
faxing it back with paper nowadays. If tools help you to be more productive
and save time, that's the way to go.

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username42
I am working since 1994 and I can ensure you that the amount of paper produces
has never stopped reducing. We have shared directory where we had many
shelves.

Paperless office is not yet there, but it is always improving. For example, I
am changing my bank and my main complain against my previous bank is that it
was too much paper.

------
Toenex
Of course a major advantage of paper is that it _isn 't_ connected to the
internet.

