It’s not just Al Gore. We could all do a bit better with the environment. A big offender is the use of paper for printing.

Once its printed, we probably stack it somewhere so it can attract dust. Let no desk surface be uncovered!

Then, we wonder where that dang printout of the schedule went. Didn’t I print it just the other day?

Well, wake up! There are easier ways to manage your docs and then find what you need.

I learned my lesson when I decided to sell TransDigital. We accumulated paper in all forms: plain ol’ wasted paper, signed contracts, technical specs for projects, project status updates, and so on. The prospect of physically moving all of it was not enticing. So, right after selling, we bought an eFax account and faxed it all to ourselves. This allowed us to do the following:

• Recycle the paper
• Organize all our important company documents and quickly recall them
• Store all company documents electronically
• Quit worrying about the “act of God” issues: flood, fire, etc.

I still follow the practice of scanning all important documents (home and work). It’s simplified my life.

Your company can do exactly what I did or do it a little more professionally. There are companies that exist to scan, sort, and store documents. (If you are using them, then this post is skippable!). There is also software that can help you with this.

We sell a system called Teleform (retails at $8000/desktop scanning station). It helps companies manage documents and is one of the industry leaders. When you combine a system like Teleform with internal processes, you can achieve the type of benefits I did. We manage all our POs, signed contracts, policies, etc through scanning systems.

If you are growing rapidly, you should look into software to help you manage the paper, routing documents, and develop a retention policy. Otherwise, you’ll end up buying a lot of filing cabinets, wasting employee time looking for documents, and being frustrated.

Some resources:

Amdoc , Teleform, VeBridge

ELAN Home Systems is hiring a full time web developer. The company has some really cool products and continues to grow. This is an opportunity for someone to come in and really make an impact. There are lots of things to add to help the business, its dealers, and consumers.

ELAN Web Developer Position PDF

Teaching your child to tie his shoes? Is it possible? Yes.

Recently, the WSJ ran a story on outsourcing so much in one’s personal life. One company that helps you get things done is GetFriday. You can outsource quite personal tasks such as arranging party details, paying bills, setting up appointments, and so forth.

Their uncommon requests are great (and they say a bit about our society):

• Daily wake up calls with the local weather report and instructions to get up, make the bed and exercise.

• Reminding an over-zealous client to not speed and collecting parking fines. And pay his current parking fines.

• Apologizing and sending flowers and cards on their behalf to spouses of clients.

• Charting a diet plan, reminding client on it regularly, ordering groceries based on the specific diet plan

• Reading bedtime stories to a young kid on phone

• Getting a job for a person who lost his job due to outsourcing a year back. We did the job search, did the cover letters, did the resume tuning and got the client a job in 30 days.

• Fixing a broken window pane of a house in Geneva, Switzerland. Organized a repair firm to do it.

• Collecting home work information from teacher’s voicemail and emailing it to the client (parents of the kid).

• Organize an event in Columbia. Fixing dignitaries, calling up, getting appointments, scheduling meetings for the event. This was for a magazine.

• Buying underwear on behalf of a client (online purchase only, of course).

• Research on how to tie a shoe lace meant for a kid (client’s son).

• Find a parking slot for your car in some other city even before you make the trip.

• Ordered garbage bins for home

• Get an authenticated weather forecast and weather report for a particular time in a particular place on a particular day, five years ago. This was to be used as supportive evidence for a law suit.

• Finding a missing person in the Florida hurricane. We found a contact who had found this person. Task was handled through the web.

• Talking to parents in our client’s stead.

 

Hilarious…