Paper-less Tigers

I was impressed to see Dennis Howlett mention in this post he has been paperless for 3 years. I had a manager at Gartner, Dave Taylor who had disciplined himself to electronic documents 10 years ago!

I admire such folks. In an on-going crusade against the cost of printer ink, I wish I could do as well as them, but I must admit when I review legal and other negotiation documents for my clients I like to spread the pages around so I can see patterns easier, and go back and forth across pages quicker. It also makes airplane reviews easier.

My solution has been to lower the cost of print. My friend there has been a tireless Brother HL-1440 laser which has over 4 years yielded 6,000 copies (at 5% coverage) for each $ 60 high-yield cartridge and needs a drum every 20,000 copies for around $ 100.  I also tend to print 2 pages on one piece of paper - what the heck, the PDA has even smaller fonts.

It will be a sad day when the Brother finally dies of exhaustion - as it almost did when it started acting up a couple of weeks ago, but my interpid wife found a workaround to keep it going.

Now, if I can only get her to slow down her use of the color HP2605 for brochures and other stuff for her business. That thing requires 4 cartridges that cost about $ 300, and each has a yield of only 2,000 pages (the black one does somewhat better at 2,500 pages).

I even offered to call her a Paper-less Tigress, and she just growled :)

Comments

[Anshu Sharma]

You should look at Pixily (www.pixily.com). They can help turn your life paperless, I am told. I haven't yet tried the service but it looks pretty impressive.

[vinnie mirchandani]

Anshu, services like Pixily help you remove paper clutter, but not sure they help reduce printing costs...they scan paper docs...

[Krishna]

Hey Vinnie,

No wonder why she growled... Just a title isn't incentive enough. Offer to buy a piece of her business at a premium (you can offset it by print-cost savings), may be she'd relent :)

BTW, felt slightly unusual that you had missed out on passing away of Prof.Randy Pausch in your weekend stuff... Normally I get to read a lot first here.

And good luck to your daughter for the Texas tournament!

[vinnie mirchandani]

Krishna, thanks...and my tribute to the prof is now up...appreciate the nudge...it is a great talk

[Dennis Howlett]

I'd been paperless for billing since 1993 when I left practice and was attaching invoices to stories sent electronically via good ol' CompuServe. It was only after we went to France in 1997 that I could get serious about going paperless because there I didn't need to print stuff out. Most of the paper I had was inbound. Such a pain. Even now, I still have to manage a ton of inbound paper. France and Spain are bureaucratic nightmares.