I’m in the process of cleaning my desk. Pause a moment and consider how big a chore has to be before it becomes a “process.” I did the lawnmower job yesterday (with poor Cameron hauling away the clippings, as it were), and I’ll tackle the finessing, the trimming and edging, in spare moments today.
But while I was working late yesterday, I had a blinding epiphany, a magical, mystical, miraculous method to keep my desk clean forever:
Would everyone please stop printing stuff!
I threw away half a landfill of Realtor association debris yesterday: Realtor magazine, the state and local newsletters, etc. I threw away two years’ worth of CRS membership directories, both still unopened in the boxes they shipped in. Miscellaneous Realtor magazines, direct-mail promotions I thought I might want to have a look at, the goofy workbooks they hand out at advanced-designation classes, etc. Piles and piles of paper — disorganized in the piles, but disorganized in essence, inherently non-searchable and thus inherently useless.
I thought about hanging onto the Realtor magazines, but why would I? I don’t have the time to give to everything I want to read on-line. I have almost zero time for printed books, which at least promise to repay their marginal time-cost in information density. (A marginal calculus of reading!) It could be that there is something in all those unread magazines that I cannot discover on the net. But, second-for-second of my time, I will learn so much more working the way I do now that I cannot risk wasting my time prospecting through random atoms for a nugget of gold that may not even be there.
And: Where paper is static and dead, in the net.world, good ideas get echoed. If anyone, anywhere dug up gold in a dead-tree artifact, I will run across that idea a dozen times over the course of a year on the net. The web is dynamic, self-correcting and searchable. Atom-based media are inherently inferior to electronic media.
That’s not all. Half of the dead-tree detritus I threw away yesterday was yammering about the fundamental religious virtue of being “Green.” Rationing is the conjoined-twin of Socialism. The price system is the ideal means to maximize any resource. Even so, it is beyond absurd needlessly to kill thousands of trees to sing hypocritical hosannahs about Greenitude. The organizations we belong to want to justify their outrageous dues by giving us something tangible for our money. If they stop this wanton printing of suboptimally-formatted information, they could “do something” for the environment and leave more “green” in my wallet.
In truth, some of what I threw away yesterday was paper I myself had generated: Listings, especially, and tax records, but also random notes on scraps of paper, index cards, Post-It notes, etc. I intend to cut back as hard as I can on this, too. But in terms of gross volume, the press was by far weightier than the pen.
So: Given that we have a more perfect medium before us, broadcasting the intangible work of the mind in infinitely recyclable electrons, can we please stop producing what amounts to highly-organized trash? For my own part, I’m done. I never want to do this job again, so I’ve resolved to throw printed-matter away the second it hits my desk. You might as well stop sending it. I’m not going to make time for it now, I’m not going to make time for it later, and I’m not going to let it accumulate on my desk for months and years before I get around to throwing it away. Magazines, newsletters and direct-mail packages are trash that missed the trash can — but not for long.
Do you want to get my attention? Come up with a great idea — and then promote it on-line. No longer will I let you pollute my environment with your wasted paper.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Steven Groves says:
I remember a presentation one time from an MIT researcher (seem to remember it was ‘Jarrod Linear’, but no hits on Google) about the energy spend in converting bits to atoms and atoms to bits; this was back in the early days of the Internet – example he gave was this; want to communicate a letter to an associate, use the word processor to craft the letter (bits – electronic), print it out (atoms – of paper), put it in the fax machine & press send (bits again – during transmission), received on the other end (atoms).
I still marvel at the number of real estate people I’ve met who think that a fax is the best way to send data to one another…
June 12, 2007 — 8:59 am
Greg Swann says:
> I still marvel at the number of real estate people I’ve met who think that a fax is the best way to send data to one another…
It makes me nuts, too. We communicate with our clients by email and web pages. We communicate with Realtors, lenders and title companies by fax…
June 12, 2007 — 9:20 am
CJ, Broker in NELA, CA says:
And Greg, you meant “recycled”, right? Not “threw away”.
June 12, 2007 — 11:11 am
Greg Swann says:
> And Greg, you meant “recycled”, right? Not “threw away”.
No, ma’am. In fact, everything went into the blue barrel, but that was simply to keep the black barrel free for the kind of trash that rots and stinks. My understanding is that the stuff in the curbside recycling barrels goes to a different landfill, 50 miles away from the normal dump. IOW, not only is it not recycled, it wastes 100 miles worth of fuel for the truck. As with everything associated with government, curbside recycling is insanity cloaked in piety.
June 12, 2007 — 11:21 am
John Kalinowski says:
I’m also amazed at how worthless the “information” is in the national and local Realtor magazines. It’s bad enough that they print and mail hard copies, but the content is incredibly useless.
June 12, 2007 — 12:30 pm
Matthew Hardy says:
Buy David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done”. Or better yet, save the paper and buy the audiobook for iPod. It’s the only system that has never failed me.
When I first implemented Allen’s methods, I had a folder for “scanning” to get paper to screen. Then, screw ’em: if it ain’t available in digital form, I don’t have time for it. (Ok, except for Stephen Mitchell’s Tao Te Ching which I prefer to read AWAY from my computer.)
June 12, 2007 — 1:22 pm
Mike Elliott says:
good points. great post.
June 12, 2007 — 2:15 pm
B.R. says:
Greg, does that mean Bloodhound Realty will also go paperless? No more fantastic ads in the paper to be cut apart by competing agents? No more paper flyers? No more business card door-to-doors for open houses?
We’re all guilty of flooding folks with paper…
June 12, 2007 — 2:55 pm
Greg Swann says:
> We’re all guilty of flooding folks with paper…
Indeed. That occurred to me as I was writing this morning.
June 12, 2007 — 2:59 pm
Jonathan Dalton says:
Wait … didn’t you just have a post with the cutout section of one of your own printed newsletters?
Ah, hell … B.R. beat me to it. Damn Surf’s Up.
June 12, 2007 — 4:32 pm
Sock Puppet says:
Well at least we can agree on this.
Hmmm. Business cards?
June 12, 2007 — 5:11 pm
Jim Kimmons says:
I had to take time out from reading my “New York Times Reader” to post here. I didn’t like the NYT Online, which still exists as a free service. However, the reader, at $14.95/month is absolutely amazing.
I now print out an article now and then to give to someone, but the formatting on my Tablet is great and no paper to waste. I’m actually reading more, getting all seven days, and spending less than buying the $5.00 Sunday NYT.
And as for not printing, it would be great if more real estate companies would admit, and have the nerve to tell their sellers, that print isn’t as effective at selling their home as online methods.
June 13, 2007 — 8:27 am
Orange County, NY Real Estate says:
B.R. I think we need to separate what is necessary for marketing in today’s world from massive wave marketing where companies just blast out dozens of magazines, full page advertisements and directories that could all be replaced by computer based formats. There is certainly validity to your point that we all create our own excess paper (I’d like to some day carry my listing sheets I use on buyer appointments on a Mac tablet but that won’t happen until Apple creates a tablet and I can access our MLS through OS X (Hello Northstar!)). With Greg’s business card shaped open house invites, flyers and neighborhood newsletter they all serve a targeted purpose whereas the blast mailings (I cringe at the crap they shove in my mailbox from the local newspaper monopoly’s “Advertising” weekly I never recall subscribing to which is stuffed with about 75 advertisements of all shapes and colors) are just thrown to thousands of parties, straight up cold calling decade style, in hopes that someone will find their ad in the mix and have a need for the service. Perhaps they do get some hits (I hear seniors have a lot of time and scissors these days) but rather than implement some broad course of action to disarm scissor wielding seniors to stop the mess I blame old school marketing companies that sell local businesses on the concept that this junk actually works for the paper mess. Anyway, I’m getting off course. There is a very thick line to be drawn between targeted advertising (Greg’s stuff) and the 50 tire ads in the weekly crap mailer bombarding me after I just ordered tires from TireRack.com.
If anything people have proven that if you put it on the internet the people who need it will come. This behavior is facilitated by search engines like Google that enable people to find pretty accurate sites and companies that will service their needs quite nicely. I’m all for the bra-burning upheaval in traditional paper marketing because what, truly, is the point of a paper based contact directory for any business? Would we not be more efficiently helped by an online searchable directory or better yet — A searchable, downloadable directory that could be downloaded to Smartphones and computers, enabling us to search for what we needed when we needed it? Somewhere, somehow in time, we became convinced that rather than searching for a product to best meet our needs that it’d be smarter to shower people with a smorgasbord of services and products at all times in hopes that we’d meet their needs at exactly the right time.
Is it any wonder attention spans have diminished to the point where cracking open a peanut becomes too much of hassle for the most common of man?
June 13, 2007 — 6:52 pm