With all the talk in the office about environmental issues, conserving energy (that’s Grace and I nagging at everyone to switch off the lights and the aircon after use), cloud storage and virtualization, paperless billing, mobile technology and biofuels that reduce carbon emissions; all of which have some kind of underlying environmentally-friendly theme in some kind of digitization (paperless-ness) or other; it should not come as a surprise that I’ve adopted a personal pet green cause at work, and that is the Paperless Singapore cause!

Paperless 2012 is an initiative started by a client of ours, Greenbills, who have developed a paperless billing aggregation system for Singapore residents – a service aptly named GreenPost (but more about this later).

The reason why everyone should love the paperless cause is because it really takes so little effort to reduce paper usage in your life that it might actually take more effort to make a cup of coffee in the morning! You’ve all heard the stories about how we should do our part in saving the environment, how going paperless saves trees, ladida, so it shan’t be repeated here. But honestly, think about it – how awesome is it to be able to reduce your paper consumption, and at the same time get your life organized?

You may say that going paperless doesn’t even come close to making any real impact on the endless list of environmental problems that the Earth is facing right now, but every little effort counts!

And that’s what we believe, at Rice Communications – Don’t print what you don’t need, print double-sided documents only if you really need to print, send documents in PDF format via email instead of printing hard copies to distribute, recycle all your wrongly-printed paper, etc. Besides, don’t you think storing your documents in soft copy actually helps you be more organized, by allowing you to easily search for a file using the computer’s search function, and search within a document for something you need, using the CTRL+F function?

But I digress.

Back to paperless. I personally am a big fan of GreenPost (not only because they are our client, but because their product is aligned with what I believe in myself), as it allows the user to pull together all their e-billing services from companies like Starhub, M1, SingTel and SP Services into one single account, where users can view them all with one single login. We heard that more billers will be added soon, too!

For me, some of my favourite GreenPost features are:

• PDF e-bills
• A counter for “Number of sheets of paper saved”
• Email notification when a bill arrives
• Email reminders to pay my bills

It’s really a simple and wonderful solution for those of us who:

• Don’t want to look at paper bills
• Don’t like the flyers that come with our paper bills
• Never remember to pay our bills or need reminders about it
• Cannot remember the 200 logins and passwords to 200 different companies’ e-billing systems

On my part, there’s a love for anything that helps the conversion to paperless, and here are some of the services and gadgets I use, besides GreenPost, that help me digitize my life:

• Gmail (paperless mails, duh! Also, in my opinion, the world’s greatest email filing system)
• OCBC electronic statements (no more paper statements that I feel obliged to open and read, thereby reminding myself of how much I’ve been spending every month)
• HTC Touch2 (smart phone for Calendar, Notes app to write notes, digital camera for digital photos, access to email and all social networking sites)
• Poken (digital namecards – cool stuff, check them out – save those paper namecards if you don’t need them)
• PDF Creator (a paperless ‘printer’ that helps convert into PDF any kind of document, very useful especially if you don’t have Office 2007)
• Facebook events (paperless invitations, yay!)
• Dropbox (online storage for brochures, press releases, forms, press kits, etc. for external parties to download, instead of clogging up their emails – Outlook users will know how annoying it is to be receiving a 10MB file via email)

So I guess (I hope) these all help me atone for my sins of overusing the one type of paper that I cannot do without … tissue paper!

*blows nose noisily into super soft, super thick, 3-ply tissue paper*