Tuesday was paper recycling day in my street. We’ve just moved house so we left a huge amount of paper on the kerb. Among the pile were nine supermarket carrier bags* of paper from my home office. I held another couple of bags back because the material was potentially sensitive and needed shredding.

Nine carrier bags is a lot of paper. It certainly weighed a lot. At a guess I’d say it amounts to entire file cabinet drawer. And yet, recycling that pile has barely made any practical difference to the space in my home office. It is as if, where paper is concerned, this room uses the same technology as Dr Who’s Tardis.

Clearly the whole paperless journalist project needs to move up a gear.

*Around these parts we are asked to put recycled paper in plastic bags.

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Sitting in front of me as I write are six paper notebooks.

Four are A4 size, two are old-school reporter notebooks. One A4 notebook is open and I’ve an array of pens to hand – I’ve left a few messages this morning and am waiting for various call backs on stories I’m writing. There are many more used notebooks packed away in boxes.

I’ve made huge strides in the past two weeks reducing the amount of paper in my life – cutting the notebooks looks harder. There are reasons for this:

1. A journalist’s notebook is a legal record of interviews, conversations and so on. If something goes badly wrong and I find myself on the wrong end of a defamation action, my notebook could be valuable evidence. In the past I’ve been told to keep old notebooks for seven years – many journalists keep them for longer.
2. Notebooks are valuable. I write quotes, dates, times, phone numbers, web and email addresses as I go. There have been many times when I’ve gone back to a notebook and found a missing piece of information.
3. It’s physically hard to scan notebooks – I mainly use ring-bound ones.
4. My handwriting is not easy to read, I use a little self-taught shorthand. It’s even harder to read scans of this material.
5. There’s far too much to scan anyway.

Years ago I though my Apple Newton MessagePad might solve this problem, but it was simply too slow and clunky. My Palm TX was also a useless substitute and the old style tablet PCs couldn’t hand the job either. I did see something called a ‘chording keyboard’ which looked potentially useful, but in practice it was too flawed.

I’m interested in hearing how other journalists have dealt with this problem.

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Ten days after deciding to cut the amount of paper in my home, I’ve made real progress. I’ve already packed a filing cabinet drawer worth of paper into plastic bags ready for the fortnightly recycle collection. That’s about 20 kilograms in total and around 5 percent of the non-book or magazine paper floating around my home.

I’ve also switched to electronic billing for my mobile phone account and electricity. Switching my Telecom account to paperless transactions has proved slightly trickier – although I expect to make the move soon.

I’m running up against some problems:

1. I’m a journalist and I keep most of my notes in reporter-style notebooks or larger A4-sized notebooks. For legal reasons I need to keep these safe for some time after publication.

My handwriting is atrocious and anyway, scanning this material doesn’t appear practical.

I’d appreciate any advice on how long I should keep these notebooks. The statute of limitations for defamation cases is generally only two or three years in many countries but I haven’t been able to find out the term in New Zealand law.

2. There’s a similar legal problem with old business paperwork. I’ve a sizable collection of paper from when I ran a business in Australia – I’m supposed to keep this for seven years, which means I’ve about 18 months to go before junking it. There’s simply too much to scan and, with such a short amount of time to worry about, it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

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Four days ago I moved house. I’m sitting at my laptop writing this in a cave of unpacked boxes. You’ve probably found yourself in a similar place at least once in your life.

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the shift was the sheer volume of paper we needed to move between houses. Despite living in a digital age, paper accounted for a third of the total weight moved.

We’ll put books and magazines – probably the largest part – to one side for the moment and concentrate on other forms of paper.

Home business is paper-centric

I run a home business and my wife also has a business. So there’s plenty of paperwork. We have three full two-drawer filing cabinets of business documents. At least the same amount again stored away in boxes.

We’re journalists, so we keep archive copies of newspapers, magazines etc we have written for in the past – about two more filing cabinets-worth. Reference material would fill another cabinet.

There’s probably another cabinet of non-work related paper. Add in our children’s old schoolbooks and their paper junk. All-in-all our total paper collection is enough to fill a large room. Around 6 full-sized filing cabinets.

Admittedly we’re at the high-end of the scale, but our paper hoard is not abnormal.

Clearly I’m going to need to get rid of as much as this as possible. Ideally we’d have no paper, but that’s unrealistic. I’m aiming to cut things to just two two-drawer filing cabinets and my scanner is my friend.

Before starting on the task, it’s worth reminding myself paper is:

• Awkward to move
• Heavy
• Bulky
• Relatively fragile
• Many documents are badly faded or torn
• Combustible
• Prone to mould (and therefore vaguely unhealthy)
• Difficult to search.

Scanning started years ago

We knew the move was coming months ago, so I started scanning documents well in advance. Six months later I estimate I turned around 10 percent of the total pile into digital documents. At this rate it could take four years to reach my target. I’ll be writing more about these experiences in the future.

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