As a business professional, I fend off hundreds of emails in a day with various weapons of choice like my BlackBerry or my company laptop. (One recent report estimates the average person sends and receives 133 email messages a day!) Yet just when I think I'm winning the "Battle of the (email) Bulge" by diligently responding, filing, and deleting, I realize mine is a pyrrhic victory. The corporate paper trail I deal with extends well beyond email, piling up in reams of documents that clutter our desks, filing cabinets, faxes, and printers.

The real war against document proliferation is going on right in front of us: on the desktop (the physical one, not the virtual one). A recent study by the Association for Information and Image Management (AAIM) shows that the average professional photocopies a single document 19 times. Multiply that by the estimated 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. that are growing at a rate of 22% per year and you have quite a pile of paper to manage.