Did you know (I LOVE starting sentences off like that) the average American office worker prints 10,000 sheets of copy paper a year (that's 110 pounds) compared to the average British worker who prints 8,000. That's still a lot, but this blog is about baby steps. I get, on average, 200 emails a day and sometimes, I get a whole lot more. It is too easy to read an email, realize I need an address for a meeting, hit print, and send 5 pages of correspondence to my printer in order to pull out 3 lines of information for later. How much easier would it have been to write that address into a planner I'm already using, put it in my blackberry, or write it on the back of a piece of scrap paper?
Besides the obvious environmental impacts, think about it. You hit print, walk to the printer, go through several sheets of paper, find what you need, circle it, fold it, put it away (or even worse, you print it only to add it to you blackberry/planner as well).
That's the thing. You've just received 200 emails, your brain is fried, and you're not thinking. I can't tell you how many times in a work day I just DO NOT think. Processing my workload becomes an automatic task and somewhere along the line, thinking was moved a little bit lower on the priority list.
Sometimes we need little reminders to think. So even though you find it may obnoxious the first time you see it, those little reminders at the bottom of emails asking you to THINK before printing aren't talking down to you - they're reminding all of us, who are over worked and over-processed, to just take a small moment from our too fast-paced days and think before we do something. Think before printing the email (on clean paper, no less). Think about whether there is there is another way to retain the information before printing. Yes, sometimes you will still have to print, but hey, sometimes you may not.
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