Going Paperless
How many of us describe ourselves as "paper people"? People who prefer to use hard paper copies of things, rather than the digital version. For a long time I have seen myself as part of this group, however more recently I decided to try and reduce the amount of paper that I use, and this post will explain my reasoning and some of the tools I'm using to do so.
As you know, a sheet of paper is made from trees. It's easy to look at an A4 sheet of paper and think "oh, this is so small relative to a tree, it probably doesn't use that many resources to make". But when you scale this up to a national or even global scale, the numbers surrounding the use of paper are surprisingly large. After doing some reading, I found out that on average each person in the UK consumes 4.48 trees per year in the form of paper, 90% of Sunday newspapers are thrown away in the UK, and globally we cut down 4 billion trees each year for paper (equivalent to 1% of the Amazon Rainforest, each year). I won't bore you with more numbers and data, but when you look at the bigger picture, we do consume a fair bit of paper!
Thinking about where this paper gets used heavily, schools, offices and businesses are good examples. A lot of the tertiary sector still relies on using hard paper copies of documents alongside technology and computers, keeping the term "paperwork" from going extinct. I think that people may have some feeling of inertia when it comes to moving away from paper; its been done for so long and everyone is used to handling paper copies of everything, why change it? I too, during my time at school up until my first year of university, preferred using paper copies of everything over the digital versions. This ranged from my school planners to printouts of lecture notes and tutorial sheets. I was so used to using paper I hadn't really considered the alternative, until recently.
I partly have the pandemic to thank for helping me switch to using more digital media. As my studies went remote, and I was learning from home, there were no longer paper copies of lecture notes available. Communication moved online, to platforms such as Teams and Zoom. Assignments, projects and coursework were all completed and submitted online. It was a sudden shift to a more digitalised way of learning. We all had to adapt to this, and I found myself looking for digital alternatives to replace my paper-copies.
One way that I have reduced my paper use is by using the calendar function on my laptop (Outlook Calendar). Previously I used to have an annual planner, in which I would write any important dates, meetings, events or deadlines that were coming up. This has been my preferred method for the past 8 years. But after switching to using the digital calendar, I found it as useful, if not more, than the physical one. It allowed me to have all my plans clearly shown in a single place, and was much easier to edit information. You can add multiple calendars onto Outlook Calendar, meaning I could separate my university, personal and extracurricular involvements quite nicely. It also syncs well across all your devices, keeping your calendar updated constantly. Going forward, I think I will continue to use Outlook Calendar, and I don't see myself reverting to the physical planner that I had for so long.
For me personally, printing out lecture notes was a large contributor to my overall paper use. But over the past 18 months of so I have gotten more comfortable with working with digital versions of documents, in turn realising the importance of having a good file management system on your computer. Just as you would file away paper in an orderly fashion, you should do the same on your computer. I try to put all my work in clearly separated files, so that when I do want to find something, I know exactly where it is. Additionally, I try to use digital versions of documents, so that I'm not printing off 100's of pages to read. Nowadays there are also some great apps you can use to edit, annotate and create digital documents such as Notability & OneNote, to name a few. I now annotate my lecture notes on my tablet, and I think that it has been a more efficient way for me to approach note-taking in lectures. It also saves me having lots of paper to file away (not to mention the sheer weight of full lever-arch files!).
The above are just some of the things that I have tried recently to reduce my paper use, and so far its working. I'm finding myself press that 'print' button less on my laptop, as well as doing less physical paperwork which is always nice. However, I do still like to keep one item on paper, and that is my daily to-do list. I like to write out my tasks for the day, and get that feeling of satisfaction as you can physically cross something off your list. I try to do this on rough pieces of paper and not new sheets, but I think that's one thing that I won't be digitalising for a while.
I hope the blog post has shown to you some of the ways that I'm transitioning to become paperless. Sustainability is an area that I'm becoming increasingly interested in, and becoming paperless is something that we should be looking into as we move into the future. As society is set up now, it would be almost impossible to eliminate paper use all together, but there are definitely steps which we can take to go paperless! Thanks for reading :)
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