I think I am finally beginning to understand my twisted relationship with paper.

As a student at Columbia Business School, I spent the past year shuffling around the massive piles of paper: class notes, problem sets, articles, course readers, bank statements, bills, and receipts. Given my constant frustration with this, you’d think that I’d be a little more paper savvy. Sadly, I too am a contributor to the sobering statistic that most documents are printed or copied up to 19 times.

Last week, we here at OfficeDrop wrapped up a critical project. We’d done much of it using shared documents and, as a result, had not really generated a lot of paper in the process. When looking at the final version, I thought I’d print a copy of the 43-page doc for our files. Why? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps, I thought I would be nice to sit down and read through the document later, at my leisure. I always find that I retain more information when I read a hard (versus onscreen) copy of a document. Maybe I just wanted the hard-copy evidence of our accomplishment- a little trophy, if you will. Either way, a colleague stopped me: “We don’t print.” He was right– that’s just not our gig here. We’re trying to help people sort through the paper in their lives, not add to the pile.

I thought about my knee-jerk reaction to print the doc, thinking about why I prefer (or believe that I prefer) reading physical, rather than digital, documents. It dawned on me that the big difference is that I usually read paper documents armed with a pen, pencil, or highlighter. I underline as I read along and make notes, most of which are illegible, even to me, in the margin. Since I end up underlining half of the text, little argument could be made that I am highlighting the most important parts of a document.  Maybe I just drag my pen along the page so that I pay attention to what I am reading. Catherine Marshall, a reasercher at the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M, studied copies (8 – 20 copies each) of various texts from a university library to try to figure out exactly why people annotate the way that they do. Interestingly, she found that:

“annotations become a visible trace of the reader’s attention when the material is difficult and in narrative form; in other words, attention is easier to maintain if the material is relatively accessible. Philosophy texts, with their oftentimes dense narratives, are particularly prone to page after page of highlighting or underlining.”

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that the shift to paperless systems has not occurred. People (myself included) need to be able to interact with their documents. Current software applications don’t support such interaction. This is what we’re working to fix at OfficeDrop, i.e. bringing your paper documents to life. If users are able to annotate their digital documents, with the same ease and intuition made possible be a pen, they won’t need to print these documents out. Even when they’ve made comments on paper copies, these can be scanned into OfficeDrop for easy storage, sharing, and search.

We’re hoping that this will help reduce prevalence of impulse printing and maybe, just maybe, help people live in harmony with their documents.