Paperlessness

Today I was at a client’s office who is about to move. And so, it was time to clean out the file cabinets and move as little as possible.

There are rules about document retention so much remains, but I threw out perhaps 10 banker boxes worth of material. All of it useless, or worse. If you roll that way, hundreds of trees died for very little. Certainly energy was expended wastefully.

Concurrently, the same office was giving Slack a try. I’m not sold on it yet, and of course its real value is intra-team, so in my business with many clients it seems to be somewhat misplaced, but still at this client it is picking up steam. (And yes, I am aware of Ryver.)

It seems like many of these productivity tools are designed specifically by and inadvertently for the tech community. They build what they know, but their applicability across sectors is questionable.

But back to paper. Both paperlessness and the frictionless, open communication office have been promised for a long time. But we never get there and I don’t think we ever will.

First, we are physical so we like objects and that includes paper. I will amend this when we are loosed from being meatbags. Second, we are fallen and mistaken human beings, and so communication will always be fraught with peril. “That’s not what I meant” is the key phrase throughout history. I will amend this when we achieve mind-reading, and then only maybe. Our thoughts may still be coded in the medium of language, so imperfect.