Paperless Office Frustration

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#1

I have a question about the paperless office. Today I am VERY frustrated! I feel like an old goat who can’t adapt, but this paperless notion is taking up so much time. I can’t see the productivity. Perhaps someone out there can tell me where I am going wrong. I find that when I have to review a file it now takes me at least 4 times as long as I have to click, click, click each of hundreds of correspondence open. Most are crap, of course, and would be flicked passed in less than a second with paper. The new instructions are to name each email and letter with a subject and save. Thus when an email comes in, I have to save it as text by saving, then hitting the major sub folder, then the sub sub folder, then the sub sub sub folder then the sub sub sub sub folder till I get to a list of the client numbers. I open the client file then hit the sub folder. Then I name the email with the date, type of file (email), who it was from and now a subject as well.

So, where exactly am I saving time? I must be doing this all wrong. Any ideas on how to actually deal with a paperless office when you need to work? We use a MS operating system. Nothing fancy.

#2

ctrl+F

works wonders

#3

My workplace has 2 streams - one is totally computerized and the other is still using paper documents. Although the concept is that everything computerized is faster; the truth is staring at the screen intensely all day long takes a toll on you, and there are always all sort of programming & networking bugs going on and off all the time. :cool:

I’m just saying, sometimes, paper is actually faster :eek:

#4

I’m feeling the same way. Paper can be significantly faster. It may only be my generation, but I also find that I read paper in a more detailed way and retain more of what I read. Not sure why that would be though.

Not sure about control f searches. They are unlikely to help unless you are searching for something specific. A review of a file is a general thing.

#5

The “paperless office” concept is just another in a long line of business buzz-words. Many offices are implementing paperless workflows, and very few seem to know anything about what they’re doing.

#6

The thing with paperless I find is that it takes awhile to set up things that will make it faster after you finish.

Like for instance I have spreadsheets of crap that their only purpose is to make finding stuff elsewhere faster lol.

#7

We’ve been running a paperless office for a few months now. One of the benefits was that we wouldn’t have to worry about folders going missing. In four years I had maybe three or four folders that got misfiled and lost so that sounded a good idea. Unfortunately the paperless model relies on your colleagues not being smeg brains and accidentally deleting, moving or renaming files. So far we’ve have whole directories of files go missing as someone pressed the wrong button. And if someone tries to move a directory whilst someone else is working in it all manner of problems come up. We’ve come up with a work around of printing out the files when they come through electronically and not telling the bosses. Seems to works.