Photo author: Ti.mo
OK, so what’s the big deal with still using “vast” quantities of paper for various office tasks?

Recently a friend of mine was shocked of what she called the paper mountains on my shelves. She’s a student like me and we get course material in .pdf form for virtually everything. When I need to study, I print out what I need on my Lexmark E120 laser printer. She on the other hand claims to “save trees” by reading it all from the computer screen. I also use the .pdf to search for key info within the bulk of the material (sadly, a ledger of 200 pages doesn’t come with a search function), but once i found it I switch back to paper, which is way easier to read from.

The same with blogging and other types of work I need to do. Although I can almost always get online no matter where (see my Mobile Office in this post), most of the time I prefer to use pen and paper to scribble down ideas, draw diagrams, do calculations or even write first drafts for posts. To be honest I don’t exactly spare the sheets doing this, I go through about a 500-sheet packet a month for this alone (plus a 2500-page toner for my printer lasts about 2-3 months).

I got used to this because when sitting in at lectures, it’s far less obvious that you’re doing something else when you’re writing away than when you’re typing at your laptop like mad. So when an idea drops on me I write it down right away instead of waiting until I get home (”Err… what was I going to write about?”)

However, it seems I should come up with some sort of filing system for all the loose half-written pages I end up with - this post started up about 2 months ago as a few squiggled lines on a piece of paper, which I only now rediscovered in some course notes while I was reorganizing the “mountains of paper” on my shelves…