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Posts Tagged ‘paper’

Moving closer to a paperless world

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

For many years now, I have been trying to move toward a completely paperless world.
This is hard in a world that loves paper. Many people love paper because it’s tactile and they can feel it and see it. Not me. I hate little pieces of paper all over the place, and trying to organize and make sense of it all. I got a phone many years ago that allows me to write everything in it. All my notes are digital, I can sync the phone to the computer and vice versa, and all these notes can be modified and organized digitally and archived. I can copy and paste, and edit without having to re type things.

So that is just in terms of notes and general use of paper, it goes far beyond the unnecessary use of trees. I’m not even going to get into purchase receipts, 3 words: tax time nightmare.

But there is another use of paper that annoys me to no end: Checks. The whole idea of writing, sending and depositing paper checks for business transactions seems to me so 20th century. It is the only reason I use a bank machine. I am even thinking of giving clients incentives to use electronic means of payment, and attaching links (to my now electronic invoices) to pay electronically. I know big businesses won’t go for this in the near future.
Would you use electronic methods of payment if you got 1% off your bill? I would love to get your feedback on this. Paypal and similar tools are very easy to use, even if you don’t have an account.

So if you use paypal, please let me know I would love to pay you this way, and I would do it for free!

Do I want the world to progress faster than it is ready to? Maybe, it’s all about simplifying life for me, is that so wrong?