Picture it. It’s 8 pm, a pitch-dark night, and the wind is howling outside your construction trailer. Everyone else went home hours ago. They’re sipping on a Bud Light in front of the Thursday night football game while you’re stuck at your desk trying, and failing, to find one… last… document… before you can call it a day.

It’s an RFI you know you’re going to need first thing tomorrow morning, and you’re looking everywhere you think it could be. In the local server, the P: drive, you’ve dug through folder after folder. CTRL-F has basically worn off your keyboard at this point. Nothing.

You’re trying to remember logins for all of your cloud-based document storage platforms. You’re typing away, getting red error message after red error message. Password incorrect. You have to reset three passwords and answer a bunch of security questions you barely remember. It’s driving you nuts.

And then you try your company’s project management platform. You don’t know how the PM decided to organize the folders in the platform, and the naming conventions aren’t clear to you. Are the folders organized by date? Why is there a Current Set Folder, and a Latest Set folder and even a DO NOT USE folder (who does that??)?

You’ve sent out a few texts to your team asking for help. Some haven’t responded yet, others have said, “Wish I could help you, but I don’t know where it is. Sorry.” You lay your head on your desk.

All of a sudden you hear a noise that jolts you up. The hair stands up on the back of your neck. You look around. You hear it again. It’s your laptop’s low battery alert- you let your coworker borrow your charger earlier in the day, and you realize that he forgot to give it back. Now, your computer is about to die, you still don’t have the doc you need. Time is running out.

Your worst nightmare, right?

Everyone wants to avoid this nightmare scenario, but let’s think about ways you could have eliminated the problems that kept you at your desk long after everyone else was at home.

Silos: You were searching in multiple places for your document- your local server, cloud platforms, and your project management software. If you were using DADO, all your documents are in one place, meaning you conduct one search. Simple.

Passwords and Logins: How many passwords are we all juggling at any given time? Searching for your project documents with DADO, you’re not constantly jumping in and out of different programs to find what you need.

Communication: You didn’t know where your doc was saved, and you had to rely on reaching out to other team members to tell you where you find it. If they’re busy or don’t know, you’re stuck. DADO eliminates the need for those urgent texts and calls.

Do you have a document nightmare story?  If it is not overly traumatizing, please share with us in the comment section below.