Not long ago, while visiting a client’s office, I watched as he got up from his desk, looked on a couple of bookshelves, opened some file drawers, and finally said to his assistant, “Where’s the phone book?” “It’s in that cabinet,” she said, pointing across the room. “What are you looking for?” As he walked to the cabinet he said, “I have to call the vet to make an appointment for Mitzi.” Mitzi is his cat. He found the phone book and started back to his desk just as his assistant said, “Here you go. I’ll get him on the line for you.”

In the time it took my client to find the phone book his assistant had found the phone number on-line and had dialed the number for him. It was a learning experience for my client because it showed him that with just a little bit of effort he could have discovered that there was an easier and much more efficient way to do things. But my point is that, for the most part, the tools to reduce your office operating costs, improve the office efficiency, and make you own time more productive are already there in your office.

The trend in many offices is to go paperless. But many executives are saying, “I can’t go paperless. It means investing in all this new equipment, and changing the way we do business, and that way works now and has worked for 25 years, and besides, the founder of the company, Old Man Smithereens, well, he really likes his paper.” We’ve all heard it. We may even have said it, in one form or another. And when we were saying those things there was a tiny quiet voice in the back of our heads saying, “You’re throwing your money away and here is a way to keep some of it for yourself, but you just won’t take the time to find out how to do this.” Actually, the voice in the back of my head said, “You’re an idiot!”

Maybe you can’t go completely paperless, but that’s okay. We can do this in little steps and start saving money slowly. You can start slowly, but you do have to start, and you are using the tools to go paperless right now. For example, your customer calls and asks you to send another copy of the proposal. Instead of printing yet another copy and faxing it, print the proposal to pdf (you can do that directly from your word processor) and ask the customer if you can e-mail it to him. Let him print it if he wants to spend the time and money to do it. You aren’t paperless, but you are using less paper. To say nothing of using less money.

As for Old Man Smithereens, he’s the guy who keeps a rotary telephone on his desk because he just doesn’t like that touch tone contraption. Pick your fights, and that is one you can pass on.

Here is another way to look at it. The next time you go to the office supply store to buy copy paper take a close look at what you are doing. A ream of standard copy paper, nothing special, just a plain package of regular copy paper is about $4.50 or $5.00. A couple of those is about what you spend on lunch. For or five of those reams is the same as lunch with a customer. Where do you think your money is better spent?

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