June 4th, 2009

By Tim Sanders
Saving the World at Work
This post originally appeared May 24, 2008

Whether you are a company, or just an individual, you must continually innovate to maximize your green-ness. The best way to do this is by focusing on a single weekly innovation. Think about everything you do as you do your workaday, and isolate areas where you can reduce your impact on the planet.

This week’s innovation is to reduce the printing that I create via my documents. Frequently, we author presentations (PowerPoint or PDF) that, if printed by the recipient, could create a massive print job. Each page we use makes a difference, so I’m beginning to review my outgoing documents to make sure that I’ve reduced the page count — making each page beg for its life. If the document is 3 pages, and the third page is just one paragraph, I reformat the document to expand margins or reduce the footer/header to turn it into 2 pages. Same goes with power points. I send them out in handout format, fitting 2 to 4 on a page if my recipients hit the print button without thinking.

Finally, I’ve started to use GreenPDF to add a little tag to my PDFs, encouring my recipients not to print out the document unless they need too.

If the automakers can green up by reducing how much gas they force their customers to use, I can think the same way as an information worker.

While I’m pretty excited about this new idea, it is only one of 50 that I need to come up with this year. I’ll give myself two weeks off this year for good behavior.

Read more from Tim at SandersSays and at the Saving the World at Work site.