Saving The Planet.........Lorraine's Blog

Due to the worldwide pandemic we have been forced to change our working ways for some time now. This has become very apparent to me having to function in a different way, as everyone has undoubtedly done revised the working day, home schooled our children, no longer having a daily commute to work sitting in traffic jams.

All the things that we took for granted have changed beyond belief in this last year.

One thing that I have taken as a positive from working from home, is going paperless. I like many others printed most emails, orders and other relevant day to day items, had paper catalogues and reams of notes that had been typed and printed for future prosperity. I would use my manual daily when in the office and forgot to bring it home with me on the day I packed my laptop and mouse and thought I’d be working from home for maybe 5 weeks at the most, would I need my trusted manual.

Well some 13 months later I am a firm believer of think before you print,. Do I really need a hard copy of what I have at a touch of a button on my screen.

I attach any useful documents for reference, checking and confirmation, I use the magic cloud as my new manual. Anything I have saved on my desktop is uploaded to a very well organised virtual filing system much like I was taught in my apprentice days no longer boxes full of historic papers that we never actually read any of, as they are all saved and easily accessible.

I use my printer/scanner/copier as a scanner now only printing the most important items that I will need in future and that has been nothing, zero, nada.

So home working, I take this very valuable lesson I have been taught throughout the lockdown 2020, that we need trees, we don’t need reams of paper filling rooms of buildings that we have not entered for 12 months.

We need Trees!

I acknowledge I had resisted the concept of a paperless office for quite some time but being forced to change my, what I can openly admit were trained habits of days gone by, what we used to do is something I am using to review my daily work environment constantly. Finding new and innovative ways of working to reduce costly output and improve our working ways, and quality of life is my new motto. When we are able to resume working in the office it may be time to understand why we do the things we do and how we can change them for the better not just for ourselves but for the environment.

Ok so there are some things that will always need to be printed, but I feel very positive that this is something I will adhere to in the coming months as we prepare to move back to the office.

The next habit… driving to work, to go on the bike and enjoy the ride.