Saving the planet is all well and good, but unless you have a magic ring and an 80’s cartoon series it’s not your actual job.  Saving money is much more measurable, especially with recession cutting through the economy like a chainsaw at a soufflé convention, and nowadays you can do that while protecting the planet at the same time.

Eco-friendliness is often associated with happy hippies slightly less financially motivated than their own granola bars, but a few tips and tricks can help any online project manager reduce their footprint and their financial losses:

1.  Go Paperless

As a virtual task manager the paperless office is something you should already understand.  Whether your electronic office is all on your desktop, or you’ve moved onto the next step of entirely web based project management (with the enormous safety and security that brings), you should have kicked that old paper habit.

But some need hard copy like a nicotine fix, printing entire e-mails in order to highlight the relevant passage in bright yellow, stick it into a binder like the world’s most boring scrapbook, then (presumably) squirrel away all the scraps for insulation for their winter nest and hibernation.

You may not think much of the cost of paper, but you should be the sort of person thinking of the second-level effects: less printing means less laser toner cartridges, and based on the cost, those things are made out of Fabergé eggs and filled with ink squeezed from endangered octopuses.  For small businesses, or those involved in online collaboration (meaning you have to pay for your own printer), kicking the paper habit can save a lot of time and money.

2.  Working Remotely

Some say that the internet enables interaction between offices around the world, and while they’re right, that sentence means they’re still missing the point.  Web based task management systems mean that for many there’s no real point in “offices” at all, and we all turn up out of some kind of ingrained business habit.

With the proper project tools, you can effectively administer virtual tasks from anywhere in the world - including your own home.  Business culture is rapidly growing up, realizing that working from home doesn’t mean a doting granny making some temp-money by typing.  It means someone smart enough to look at a budget reading “living expenses $cost, office expenses $more cost” and realize “Hey, I can save thousands of dollars RIGHT NOW.”

If you need the eco-advantages of virtual offices explained to you, we’ll have to start from the beginning.  ”That blue thing above you is the sky”-type beginning.  Not carting yourself back and forth for two hours every day doesn’t just save your time, it saves an enormous amount of emissions - not to mention all the resources and electricity not being used by an extra office.

3.  Measure Three Times, Cut Twice, Print Once

Mistakes are bad.  This has been a Revolutionary Bet-You-Never-Knew-That Public Service Announcement.  But what’s worse than mistakes are huge, glossy, custom-ordered mistakes that arrive in crates and make even the most edge-cutting online collaborative project look like a bunch of first graders.

If you’re obeying step one above, you’ll be better equipped for real electronic error-checking.  While everything should always be error-free, of course, anything due for dispatch to the printer needs a full show of hands.  This isn’t just spelling and grammar, either - the fact that you’re managing an online project means you can’t do everything yourself.  Just because the sentence “Connect the third transistor stack assembly to the high voltage input” is grammatically correct doesn’t mean your engineer will agree its right.

Landfills are full of the thirty-thousand copies of a leaflet explaining why “Fisk & Sons Accountants” can be trusted not to make mistakes.  Even when you recycle the paper, you can’t recover the energy and the costs of creating so many unwanted items.

4.  Regular Maintenance

“Saving on servicing” is the single scariest and most shortsighted sentence in the entire budgeting arsenal.  It makes a mole in dark glasses look like an optician with a telescope.  When money is at its tightest is when you can least afford a breakdown, so don’t scrimp or save on servicing your computer equipment (or the online tools that let you keep track).  One hard drive failure can cost weeks of work, and that’s the kind of catastrophe that costs clients.

As project manager you know how terrifying the phrase “my computer crashed” is - don’t let it happen to you.  Save money in the long run by keeping your computer tools in top condition.  The better condition you keep your kit in, the less often you’ll have to expensively replace the lot, and the less utterly-unmanageable electronic trash will end up polluting the planet.  Even those few parts of your PC that can be recycled require hideously toxic technology to scrape out the few salvageable scraps, and you know that most will end up rotting and rusting in non-biodegradable stacks anyway.

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Read more about Green Businesses on WeHeartWorld.

Image: Creative Commons via OfficeNow.