This month I’ve been working through a full set of documents for a sole trader. The content had already been created by an external contractor, so I’ve deliberately stayed away from rewriting anything. It’s all there, technically “done”. But as I’ve worked through it, I’ve been reminded—again—how often “done” doesn’t actually mean usable.
Most of what I’ve been doing is rebuilding what already exists into something that can actually be used day to day. Clean Google Docs as the originals. Fillable PDFs that work properly on a phone. Printable versions that don’t fall apart when you hit print. Registers moved into Sheets so they can be updated properly, with view-only PDFs where needed. Then putting all of that into a structure where there’s one source of truth, and no second guessing where things live.
And as I’ve been going through it all, it’s brought back a frustration I’ve had for most of my working life.
In nearly every role I’ve stepped into over the last 20 years, I’ve inherited folders full of documents that technically do the same thing—but have been created by different people, at different times, to suit how they personally worked. Not how the business needed to operate as a whole. So you end up with multiple versions of the same form, slightly different spreadsheets, documents saved in different places. Nothing consistent, nothing aligned.
The first chunk of time in those roles was always the same. Going through everything. Trying to work out what was current, what was being used, what could be used, and what needed to be rebuilt. And more often than not, I’d end up recreating something that already existed in three other versions—it just wasn’t structured properly to begin with.
It’s dead time. Expensive, repetitive, and completely avoidable.
And if you think about it from the business side, if there have been two or three people in that role before me, then the business has already paid for that same process multiple times. Different people, same outcome—sorting, fixing, recreating—without ever quite getting to something that actually fits the way the business runs.
What’s been sitting with me in this current project is that it’s not isolated. It’s not just the places I’ve worked. It’s everywhere. Different industries, different sizes of business, same pattern.
People do the work. They create the documents. But no one stops to step back and ask how everything fits together, or how it’s going to be used long term.
So this job, while it looks like formatting on the surface, is really about putting that structure in place early. Making sure there’s a clear set of originals, a clear place for usable documents, and consistency across everything. So that six months or two years down the track, no one is starting from scratch again.
Because the earlier that structure exists, the less time gets lost later. And the less money gets spent redoing work that never needed to be redone in the first place.