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Top 10 Printable Paper Productivity Tools
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 2:00 AM on July 24, 2008
There's a reason there's still so much paper around in this hyper-connected, everything-online age: the stuff is cheap, portable, compatible with all your applications, and everyone masters the interface by the time they're out of the first grade. Ingenious hackers and productivity thinkers, however, have taken paper to the next level in a huge variety of ways, creating templates for pocket organisers, super-handy calendars, thoughtful gifts, and even makeshift tools. Fire up your printer and let's take a stroll through some of the best printable productivity tools out there. Photo by Cirofono.
Need some lined paper for note-taking, graph paper for drawing, or bi-colour paper for budgets? Printable Paper has you covered, assuming you've got access to a printer. All of the many, many templates are free and available in PDF format, and go far beyond 8.5 x 11 sheets to business cards, receipts and invoices, and beyond. Good starting point for making your own templates, or a good bookmark for those moments where one sheet can hold you over.
Lifehacker reader and blogger Clara posts a tip she picked up from a Taiwanese life hack television show on keeping papers together without using staples or binder clips. The technique requires scissors, a steady hand, and the patience to really learn the method on one's first few tries, but Clara notes that she's kept up to 15 sheets firmly together with the trick. Not applicable to documents you can't afford to have clipped, obviously, but it makes for an eye-grabbing way to deliver documents, and perhaps a shot at a MacGyver moment if you find yourself without office supplies—the two notches could be hand-ripped, after all, if you were crafty about it.
Walk by most office's shared network printer and chances are you'll see a stack of discarded extra pages the person who printed them didn't need after all, or print jobs that were so "important" they were abandoned. PC World suggests three easy ways to reduce the amount of "Whoops! Didn't need to print that!" moments, like making liberal use of Print Preview (and selecting only the range of pages you need) and printing documents to PDF instead of paper. We like the free 
Erin Doland, editor of the seriously-organised blog Unclutterer, guest-blogs at the Zen Habits site with a kind of beginner's guide to making the first steps toward becoming an "unclutterer" versus just "clean." The difference? An unclutterer "has systems in place to handle the things he or she owns," meaning everything that comes into your abode. As one example, Doland recommends having all your paper-placing items at arm's length:
The Unclutterer blog posts a neat productivity tip that also serves to keep the dreaded Paper Monster at bay. By printing out tiny "To Do," "To Pay," and "To File" labels for binder clips and then hanging them off hooks inside a closet door, blogger 
The New York Times highlights one Google engineer's quest to achieve a paperless home, suggesting that while the paperless office may still be a ways off, a practical and paperless home may be just around the corner. Why? 
TheJobBored career blog suggests 15 kinds of documents anyone with a career should keep copies of for themselves—and, preferably, in one place, as a kind of "Personal Personnel File." Many of us might already have a box of "Important Files,", but having copies of the the papers they keep locked away at the office can prevent misunderstandings, help you prepare for salary negotiations, and possibly make your next job easier to snag. Amongst the less-likely items you should try to get copied:
