Paper Zero
Recently I mentioned Inbox Zero, a method of keeping your email inbox organized and uncluttered. Another useful organizational method I practice is what I call “Paper Zero”. Paper Zero is not using zero paper; instead it is a commitment to:
- Organize the papers you have
- Throw away transitory papers (recycle if possible)
- Transcribe important papers into an electronic format (and then throw them away)
I use a good amount of paper at work while doing such tasks as taking notes during meetings, jotting down mental reminders while debugging or marking up project schedules. So I am not anti-paper; until we all have take anywhere, instant on tablet computers with the visceral feedback of pen on paper, I will not abandon my notepad and trusty Pilot G-2 Gel pen (size 07 usually). Sometimes ad-hoc notes, sketches and diagrams are a necessity. In addition, for the sake of my eyes, I don’t like reading long documents on the screen. So printouts can be handy as well.
There are however, many problems with paper. First, its physical dimensions. Papers quickly pile up, cluttering your desk and closing your workspace in around you. Second, paper is inherently volatile. Papers can be torn, ripped, spilled on and just plain lost. Third and perhaps most importantly, papers are inherently information silos when compared to electronic documents. Papers are hard to organize, hard to search, hard to relate to other documents and for the most part single user experiences.
Digitizing your notes is not a revelatory suggestion and the benefits of having your information in an electronic format should be pretty apparent. A typical objection to applying this idea to notes at work is that as notes they are not important enough to spend the time transcribing into digital documents. My response is that they if they are so unimportant, why don’t you toss them and save yourself the desk/filing space? If they are important enough not to toss, then they are important enough that someone else should be able to know about them. Based on my handwriting at least, that implies electronic format.
Another way of looking at that question is to ask could someone pick up on your tasks where you left off from if you were unexpectedly sick or out of the office? No such transition is ever perfect, but it would certainly be helped if the other person doesn’t have to try and decipher your hand writing and filing system. If you are deliberately keeping important information to yourself to be more powerful or save your job, well then you need more than Paper Zero to help you. At least in my field, we value problem solving and effective information sharing, not hoarding.
The final benefit of transcribing important notes into an electronic format is not immediately obvious. When you transcribe notes, which were written while you were thinking about a certain situation with the entire context already loaded into your mind, you are forced to lay out your thoughts logically, exposing your assumptions and gaps in knowledge.
So even if you don’t care about anybody else, by transcribing your notes you can be more effective and have a better grasp of your subject material. In fact, this technique was frequently suggested to me by various college professors as a way to better understand and retain material prior to an exam. I didn’t always follow this advice, but the concept of it stuck with me and has proved useful outside of the classroom, in the quotation mark surrounded “real world” of the workplace.