Wasteful Tech Habits — The Tech Writer Addendum

Erik Rhey wrote a post today called “Wasteful Tech Habits That Chap My Hide” — a list that’s worthy of being posted on office refrigerator doors everywhere.

His “print everything under the sun” list item struck a chord with me. I work with people who are compulsive about printing pages and pages and pages of “stuff” off the Web, and who print endless rounds of iterative drafts of manuals on the high-end color printer in the office. It bugs me as much as it bugs the office manager.

As a writer and editor, I have to print my share of review copies of documents for myself and others at some point during their development/production cycles. In spite of this, I’ve always tried to save trees (and help manage office supply costs) by taking advantage of available printer property settings:

• Duplex printing (printing on both sides of a page of paper)
• 2-up printing (printing two pages on one side of a piece of paper)
• Combined duplex and 2-up printing (printing four pages on one piece of paper)

On the toner-usage side of things, I print most color documents with black-and-white settings, and many b&w documents with toner-saving settings (where document text comes out more dark grey than black).

I have no idea if my efforts even begin to balance out what colleagues are doing, but at least I don’t feel like I’m contributing to the problem.