Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you! I hope you all are wearing some type of green, I know I am. After all, I am of Irish decent. However, I was thinking that while we may all wear green each year, we may not all practice being green. To that end, I would like to offer up a suggestion. Why not stop and take stock of your office or work space and see where you can go green?
Start off small so that you don’t get overwhelmed. For starters, take a look at those paper files or piles, if you will. Do you really need all that paper lying around or can you create data files and then recycle all that paper? I did just that a few months ago. I scanned in all my paper documents creating .pdf files, and then added all my newly created files into the appropriate client folders on my computer. But, I didn’t stop there. I bought a portable external hard drive from Newegg.com to back my files up to, twice a week. This not only saves me time, but cuts down on the amount of paper (no more piles) that I use on a daily basis. Now, I only print documents that are essential for me to have a hard copy of, which incidentally, also cuts down on the amount of space I need in my file cabinet.
“What did you do with all the paper files”, you ask? I turned it into scratch paper for my kids and me. I am notorious for grabbing the nearest Post-It pad and scribbling little reminders down. So, I hid the unopened packages of Post-It Notes and have strategically placed small stacks of the scratch paper around my office and home so that I grab them first. When homework time rolls around and extra paper is needed for math scribbles, we reach for the extra scratch paper.
As I look around my office, there are plenty of other ways that I can “green” up the place and believe it or not, I have set a goal for myself that within six months, I will be a completely green VA! My thought is this: If we as VA’s can find creative and inexpensive ways to go green for ourselves, what an asset we would be for our clients! We could not only show them what a “green” business looks like, but we can also offer up suggestions to help them in the transition as well, thereby, perhaps finding a bigger pot at the end of both of our rainbows! 
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