I recently read Paperless Builders, and it got me thinking about all the paperlike processes I see every day across construction and engineering projects.

We talk a lot about “going digital,” but what most people have actually done is take their paper habits and move them onto a screen. It looks modern, but it works the same way it always did – slow, manual, and frustrating.

Every business says it wants efficiency, but very few are willing to change how they actually work. And until that happens, the same issues will keep repeating.

Email: The New Filing Cabinet

Most teams are still treating email like a postbox from the 1990s.

Multiple inboxes. Thousands of folders. Endless flagged emails.

People spend hours every week sorting, filing, and rereading the same messages, trying to remember what needs doing next. It feels organised, but it’s just digital paper shuffling.

The average project manager I meet has two or three active inboxes. They copy and forward between them, each one acting as a different filing cabinet. They’re doing admin work that computers could easily do — but the process feels familiar, so they keep doing it.

Filing Systems: Digital Folders, Same Old Chaos

Most companies proudly tell me their filing system is now “fully cloud-based.”
When I start using it, it looks exactly like an old paper archive, thousands of folders, nine levels deep.

Everyone creates their own subfolders because they can’t find anything in the existing structure.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or a company server. They all end up the same.

You only find things if you already know where they are.

Search is useless because filenames are random. Version control is chaos because people copy files instead of replacing them. The more digital we become, the more complicated our systems get.

Spreadsheets and Forms: Paper in Disguise

The same issue appears in every project register or form.

Spreadsheets for comments, cost reports, calculations.
Everyone has their own version, and no one is sure which one is current.

Forms that need signatures get passed around by email. Signatures are copied and pasted as JPEGs. Someone ends up re-entering the same data into three other systems.

It feels efficient at first, but it’s just more paper thinking.

The Construction Technology Mirage

There are plenty of software platforms that claim to solve these problems – Aconex, InEight, Procore, and many others all offer complete digital solutions.

On paper, they should work.
In practice, they don’t.

The issue isn’t the technology, it’s the friction.

Every new platform adds extra steps: logins, uploads, tagging, navigation. When people are under pressure to deliver, those small delays matter. It’s simply faster to open Outlook or drop a file into Windows Explorer.

Once a few people work outside the system, everyone follows.

The result is the same as before: email chains, local folders, and spreadsheets that only one person updates.

Until digital platforms become as frictionless as the tools we already use, they’ll never achieve full adoption. And without full adoption, the system fails.

The Real Problem

We haven’t failed to go digital. We’ve failed to modernise.

Most organisations still think in paper. They’ve just swapped the pen for a keyboard.

The first step to fixing it isn’t buying another piece of software. It’s learning to see the friction.

Every extra click, every login, every manual action that slows you down – those are the modern versions of paperwork.

If you can remove, or at least minimise, that friction, even inside the tools you already use – productivity will rise, stress will fall, and your systems will finally start working for you, instead of the other way around.

👉 Next: Fix Your Email Without Buying New Software
Simple steps any business owner, project manager, or engineer can take today to reclaim hours every week.