Skip to Main Content

8 Document Management Practices That are Killing Your Productivity

With 60% of office time being spent on document management, it’s important to make sure your company has streamlined processes that maximize employee productivity. We’ve put together a list of the top time-wasting practices employees engage in during the document lifecycle. How do you rate? See how many of these apply and see where you land on the document lifecycle spectrum.

document management practices
  1. Digital hoarding

    Your computer desktop looks like you saved every file you’ve ever downloaded. You can’t ever find the document you’re looking for because icons are stacked on top of each other, but you refuse to delete anything for fear you’ll need it some day.

  2. Navigating the abyss

    The downloads folder is a place you only venture into in order to fish out your most recent document download. Years of neglect have turned it into an insurmountable mess you dare not approach.

  3. Clone wars

    This isn’t the file you were looking for. Jedi mind tricks won’t save you after wasting time working on the wrong version of a document.

  4. On your mark, get set, PRINT!

    You have no way to digitally comment on or mark up documents, so you end up printing everything out for manual review. With multiple people reviewing, that ends up being a mountain of paper.

  5. Hide & seek

    Wasting time manually searching through documents for each instance of a word or phrase to edit or remove them. One always manages to slip through.

  6. All in a day’s workaround

    Your company limits the size of files you can send through email, which requires you to to add a bunch of extra steps and use external file storage options each time you need to share documents.

  7. Traffic jams

    Rather than using automated digital workflows to route documents for review and approval, you’re still hand-delivering files around the office. Cross your fingers that it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

  8. Bad forms

    Nothing like going from digital to analog to digital again to make you feel like you’re stuck in the past. Printing, manually filling out or signing documents, and then having to scan them to submit or share is so last decade.

How did you do?

If you identified with four or more of these practices, you could use a little help with your document lifecycle processes. The good news is that there are ways to automate and streamline many of the repetitive processes that businesses use. Here are some resources and tools to help you get started: