Why moving towards a paperless office is the next step in the digital revolution

With the USA using approximately 68 million trees each year to produce paper and paper products,  more people than ever are debating the move towards a paperless work environment.

Despite a noticeable change in the amount of paper used in the office on a day to day basis over the past decade, the average American office worker still makes their way through a staggering 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year. This coupled with the fact that 45% of paper used ends up in the trash by the end of the day suggests that making the change to a paperless office should be prioritised now.

Reducing the amount of paper we use is one of the major positives of the digital age. Advances in technology mean the idea of a completely digital work life is not as unattainable as you might first think. Services such as IDBS, Google Apps and Office 365 all offer collaborative solutions that have been designed to keep all of your data and files in one, online database.

Sharing all of your files in one place that is accessible from anywhere comes with major perks for office life. Collecting  your files in this way suddenly makes the office fully mobile, allowing you to work from home or on your commute without the addition of mountains of inconvenient paperwork.

File sharing, storage and organisation is 10 times easier with an online collaborative network than it is with a paper filing system. This way everyone knows where everything is and there’s no need to print off pages and pages of unnecessary paper just to share a document with a colleague.

It’s not just collaborative databases that aid the move to a paperless work environment. Emails, social media and note taking apps all help to make the journey a seamless one. With new apps and software being released each month, slowly the humble Post It note or a to-do list hastily scribbled on a scrap of paper will become a thing of the past! These digital advances mean the office is always at your fingertips without a piece of paper in sight.