Productivity for professionals was once centered on organizing the many papers, notebooks, files, documents, diagrams, and other physical items that encompassed our business lives.  The truly productive professional was one who could quickly find and reference their files to retrieve crucial data.

The need hasn’t changed.  Today, it’s all about the delivery and access.  Paper is out.  Digital is in.

“Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. “Paper has been dealt a complete deathblow. When was the last time you saw a telephone book?”

We still need to be as organized as possible to optimize our performance.  The only thing that is different now is that, for all intents and purposes, paper is a minor piece to the puzzle.  Nearly every aspect of “going paperless” has dozens of solutions offered to professionals to make it possible.  The toughest challenge occurs in taking notes.  Whether a professional is at a meeting, on a plane, or taking a tour, there are times when lugging around a laptop or trying to keep up on a smaller mobile device just don’t work:

  • Closed spaces, such as a plane or other vehicle
  • Mobile meetings or tours when notes must be taken while walking
  • Freestyle needs: when it’s better to draw a picture to get a point across
  • Creative license: sometimes, people are just able to put their thoughts down more fluidly with pen and paper than on a computer

For people with these needs, the only way to stay truly “productive to the extreme” is to have a way to take their handwritten notes and plug them directly into a computer for editing and storage.  For this, we recommend the Mobile Digital Scribe by IOGEAR.

In this review on Engadget, they note that “At $99, those of you brave enough to take the Vista plunge can unlock all those tablet features without breaking the bank, and the three of you who write faster than you type can doodle away at meetings.”

This video pretty much says it all:

To be truly productive, the paperless professional of today must take advantage of many tools. Having the flexibility to still use paper without being locked down with it is essential.

To be truly productive, the paperless professional of today must take advantage of many tools.  Having the flexibility to still use paper without being locked down with it is essential.