That makes sense to me. 

I still find writing important tasks on a whiteboard more helpful than inputting them into a to-do app.  I just can't carry whiteboards around with me.  But, yes, much more intuitive.

Kim - Many people do as you do. We have millennia of muscle memory trained in writing by hand. We think with our bodies, not just with our minds. The act of writing things down also inscribes them in our memory. If you write a note to yourself -- physically write it, with pen or pencil on paper, you can make inferences on your emotional state (and therefore the urgency of the note) by the size and shape of the letters and how hard you pressed the pen when you wrote. 

Nicholas Negroponte has a fascinating anecdote in his book BEING DIGITAL, about an interview with a Navy admiral. This was as the Navy was just going digital, and the old wall-sized battle maps were being replaced by lists of map coordinates. This admiral used to get a junior officer to transfer the coordinates back to one of those wall-sized maps.

The admiral said he could plan strategy better that way. If two ships were far apart from each other, he'd have to walk across the room to get from one to another. If they were close together in real life, they'd be close together on the wall map -- less than a handsbreadth apart. 

I realize, my main everday use of paper is to scribble notes I later transfer -- if worth keeping -- into electronic format.  I guess few people do this now, but I just find it quicker to grab a pen and scribble a couple of words than open a file or app and input the information.  I don't retain the paper notes.

Anyone else?

Very interesting perspective, Mitch.  I certainly remember dealing with "computer printouts" all the time, back when organizations had computers but employees didn't have a PC on their desk.  Horrendous.

I also remembered the early days of OCR, when it was accurate about 40 percent of the time!

I remember more than 20 years ago, sitting down with the CEO of a small company that specialized in OCR software, which was still an emerging area then. The company employed about a half-dozen people, with one or two private offices (cubicles, really) around a big common area where the rest of the people worked. 

He and I sat having lunch and talking in the common area, and I asked him, "You hear a lot about the paperless office. Is that getting closer?"

He just smiled and gestured around the room. Here we were at a company that specialized in making software that reduced companies' reliance on paper. And the room was PILED with computer manuals and printouts and other -- paper -- detritus. 

For a long time, the PC defied early predictions and actually increased businesses use of paper -- vastly. People like to print documents out. I don't know how true that is today. 

Before the PC era, documents were difficult to produce. The more memoes and reports you received or were copied on, the more important you were to the company. Now, the opposite is true -- staff and middle managers are inundated with email, while the top executives have secretaries administrative assistants to winnow through their email. 

We are still learning.  I had to sort through several chains of email correspondence this week, and although I organize my email decently, it would have been much easier -- on this occasion -- to pick up a file of memos and thumb through it.  But that doesn't outweigh the general convenience of electronic communications.

Memories.  When I moved from the large London office to the small New York office of a law firm, one of my assignments was to review every document filed in some large-scale litigation.  I used to receive several hundred-plus page faxes a day.

I soon got my own own fax machine.

Paper documents hang on because they work. We know how to manage them, and we know how to store them. Paperless documents are more efficient, but they require new work methods, and it's easier to keep doing what you know how to do.

When I started in what we used to call "the computer trade press," we used to get unsolicited press releases by fax. It was a perennial problem because we got so many of them and we wanted so few of them. At that time fax machines were fairly expensive, so there was only one machine shared by a large number of people, and unsolicited press releases would clog up the fax machine and stop us from receiving faxes that we really wanted and needed.

Eventually fax machines got cheap enough that every small working group could have one. We kept using the public fax machine for unsolicited press releases. Somebody back garbage can up to the output, then custodial staff carried off the garbage at the end of every night, and everyone was happy.

But before that day, you could be guaranteed to make yourself unpopular by receiving a 70 page fax at a time when someone else needed to receive something urgently. It was an even faster route to unpopularity than drinking the last coffee without making a fresh pot.

Consumer/customer acceptance should be on your list. But it's not their fault - businesses need to make 'paper free' easier & more convenient, by:

• assuring availability of records for standard legal retention periods, and
• making it easier for customers to view and /or download bill, invoices, etc. when they need to.