In this New Yorker href="http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?critics/020325crbo_books">article
by Malcolm Gladwell he reviews the book "The Myth of the Paperless Office"
(M.I.T.), by Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. In general you use
paper to help your creativity: shuffling it around, making notes, etc. and
leave the the filing to the computer. My colleague is fond of writing
project tasks on "stickies" and re-arranging their order into something he
believes he can accomplish. I like printing articles such as this so I can
read them on the GO train, while I am
waiting for something or, of course, during the daily href="http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wrader/slang/t.html">dump routines.
With Google around I don't need to keep
the article — just remember a phrase or two. Or I mail myself the url
to stash away, never to be recalled again.

Some random thoughts (random, as I didn't write them down and organise
them):

• There's one colleague who always has a paperless desk. Perhaps one report or a couple of text books are all there is. Perhaps he doesn't need paper. I find him rather anal though. Perhaps his lack of paper usage is a symptom. His desk looks like he has always gone on a long vacation.
• On the hand how do you classify, with respect to creative paper usage, the engineer who not only has papers, but text books from when he went to school 20 years ago, old computers, interface cards, jars of peanuts, old printers, etc? Perhaps it is some sort of attention deficit problem where he can't just organise himself to put things away or throw things out occasionally.
• My wife loves using paper to work out her thoughts. My sister-in-law's husband once commented that our wives abhor a horizontal surface. It must be covered with "stuff", papers, purse, flyers, bills, etc.
• My random thoughts seemed to have wandered from paper to stuff. But that's just me. Maybe I should have jotted something down on paper before I wrote this!