Can people be taught to be just as productive without using a printer?
And if so, how?
It doesn't answer your question, but here's how I escaped a printer-less environment decades ago and became much more productive:
My first salaried job in the 70's was being hired as the fourth programmer in a tiny Palo Alto contract programming company. We had a couple of Data General minis, two slow teletypes, and no CRTs. We worked on large assembly language programs, marking up listings for as long as possible before reprinting. After I couple of years (during which we only gained a 30 character per second dot matrix printer) I quit and looked for a company with better resources. Found a decent job at a company that happened to also have a 300 line per minute chain printer. It was heaven.
I have a printer at home I use maybe once a month, if that...to print mailing labels, mostly, or forms for obscure agencies that are far more effort to talk to electronically to make it worthwhile (I had to print a letter from my mother's doctor to get her out of jury duty, because the alternatives were a paper letter or a fax...).
At work, I print to PDF. There's a printer nearby, but I've never used it.
I haven't owned a printer in almost 20 years. I don't think that has affected my productivity writing code. I don't personally know anyone in my field (programming and system admin) who relies on printing things, seems like we have already moved past that. Almost every company I do business with sends documents electronically, and has done that for years.
I personally haven’t used a printer for anything other than legal documents in the last 5 years or so. I don’t own either. If anything, having to print something lowers my productivity.
I use pdf’s and read long documents in my tablet.
As in a "paperless office"?