Did you know that, according to the Wall St. Journal, 1 hour a day is wasted in most offices looking for missing information? This factoid is something I frequently mention whenever I’m giving a talk about ‘going paperless.’ Everyone nods their head when I say this, and the expressions of the head-nodders is always one of exasperation. Paper is inherently hard to wrangle and so we lose a lot of information just because we can’t find the paper that contains it.
But that’s only part of the story, and it’s probably the smaller part.
What about information that isn’t ‘missing’? It’s not lost, but it is in paper form as opposed to being digitized. How much longer does it take in an average day to find that information and then act on it?
I’ll bet in the average office it takes more than two hours a day. Let me give you an example to explain why I believe that.
Yesterday someone emailed me to ask for some information that I had prepared a few months ago. It was important information and so obviously I had kept it. If that information had been in paper form I would have had to go to the physical location of the paper, and then pull it, and then copy it (or scan it) and then email it (or fax it). That could have taken 10 minutes, or more if the paper was not in the same building as me.
How long did it take me to find the digital file and then email it off to the requesting person? About 30 seconds.
All I had to do was set my search focus on the large folder that contains all my 2010 documents and then type in one word to filter for documents like the one I needed. The results displayed a few choices, and I picked the one I wanted and clicked the ‘Email’ button and then started typing the name of the recipient and after three letters the ‘auto-complete feature’ of my email program guessed the right name and I then hit send. If there were a contest to see how fast I could do it, I probably could have completed the task in 15 seconds. But I think 30 seconds is still pretty impressive.
The advantages of being paperless are many, but it’s hard to appreciate them until you stop storing information in paper and learn to be comfortable with digital information. Once you do, you’d never go back to dealing with paper. It’s way too inefficient if you want to process information quickly and reliably.
You do want to process information more efficiently, don’t you?
#1 by Marriott Murdock on September 30, 2010 - 9:17 am
The ability to quickly find, retrieve, and work with information is such a critical piece of workflow and efficiency. This comes up in our daily conversations at http://www.netdocuments.com
Great post.
#2 by Thomas on April 27, 2011 - 8:38 pm
Storing information in a paper is indeed troublesome when such paper is lost. However, using computer has the threat of viruses and stuff like that. But still choose the digital form over paper in order to save the trees.
Thomas Brown
Tampa, FL
http://www.tampacriminaldefenders.com
#3 by John Campos on May 26, 2011 - 1:29 pm
I truly speak the praises of electronic documents, it makes my job a whole lot easier. I dont have to remember where I stored something, its always on the fileserver.
#4 by Herber on June 15, 2011 - 5:39 pm
I agree that going paperless would cut down on the time to find lost documents but digital isn’t the holy grail.
In order to find the information you’d need to:
* convert paper information into digital. Typically by scanning and OCR. OCR is getting better but it’s still not 100% correct yet
* store the information. It sounds like you have things stored in folders by year (2010) but with larger organizations this wouldn’t work (e.g. need to separate information by law, multi-user environments, sheer number of files that are saved)
* finally, you need a good way to search the information. Desktop search is getting better and there are some large search servers that a company can buy. But search is still difficult, especially with scanned documents.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to reduce paper information, just that we need to keep our eyes open when converting to a fully digital system. Any maybe a digital system would be all we need, a 95% time savings is better than none.