A good friend and colleague likes to tease me because I rarely (never) leave a meeting with paper. I’ve always been this way. Back in the 90′s before Interversant, whenever I would go to a client meeting with a sales person and the client had paper documents, I would hand them off after the meeting.
It’s not because I love trees or romanticize geekily the idea of the paperless office. It is because I don’t know what to do with the paper. Save them? File them? I rarely refer to anything they said so they just stacked up on my desk – or worse, got left in my car.
Maybe I was starting a trend. It seems lots of people would prefer to not have the paper clutter and the iPad is giving them the opportunity to leave the paper behind. While a lot of people worry that they can’t print from an iPad very easily, many are happier without it.
A recent study has shown that printing at work has declined as much as 15% since the release of the iPad. US companies have consumed 9% less paper since the iPad came out.
Rather than take A paper handout from a client at the meeting, I ask them to email or dropbox the electronic version to me. That way, I don’t have to store the paper, or worry about losing it. If it has stuff I need to “reuse”, I can copy and paste from the electronic version more easily and with fewer errors. And almost all of the time, they created that document on their computer anyway – so an electronic version is the original.
So how do you deal with paper at meetings? Are you like me? Or are you someone that prefers the paper copy?
