It’s an hour until your deadline. Your manager is breathing down your neck, reminding you of each of the 3,600 seconds as they slip away. You knuckle down and find your flow. You’re making good progress and remember the amazing presentation you created a few years back that would really bring this piece of work to life. You start searching for the presentation by scouring through multiple folders, USB sticks, floppy disks; racking your brain as to where you saved it. The time continues to slip away and your productivity has been completely obliterated.
Perhaps you have been sitting in a client boardroom, ready to present a major pitch only to realise the killer slide deck you crafted hadn’t been transferred to your computer. You feel relieved when you remember it was saved on your USB stick, however when you open the USB stick the file is corrupt. That pit feeling in your gut deepens and you wish you could fade into oblivion...
Unfortunately, these scenarios are all too familiar. I couldn’t count the hundreds of hours I have wasted searching unsuccessfully for work documents, uni assignments, bank statements and photos lost in endless folders and subfolders on multiple computers and hard disks. Time and time again, my flow and productivity would be completely destroyed only to be left deflated and unmotivated.
A fortnight ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Salesforce World Tour in Sydney, Australia. As soon as I walked through the doors I felt like a little child in a toy store. It was an adult’s playground. Free coffee, giveaways, networking, keynotes and thousands of people. My colleague, Willow CTO Will Sessions, was a featured presenter at the Dropbox keynote on the day. As friends do, I sat down front and centre with my iPhone camera out.
Will was being interviewed on how businesses can simplify work and improve productivity with Dropbox and Salesforce. He shared how Willow has the luxury of designing our collaboration environments in the cloud rather than relying on legacy technology. As a global company made up of professionals in architecture, engineering, technology, marketing and sales, a wide variety of tools are used including Dropbox, Salesforce, Bluebeam, Adobe, Aconex, Office 365, and Slack. For Willow, Dropbox is the central repository of all files across offices and departments. It’s where all of our file-based collaboration happens, and it’s critical to our most important workflows. Will also detailed how when integrated with Salesforce, Dropbox allows Willow to automate workflows between content and sales contracts, optimizing the sales cycle and the closing of deals.
In reflecting on Will’s insights and my own experience working with Dropbox, the benefits of such a tool became very clear. Businesses can’t afford to waste time and money on legacy technology systems that are detrimental to employee productivity and performance. Consider a commercial A380. These mega-aircraft cost a whopping $436 million and are made up of over 4 million individual parts. Pilots cannot afford to be thinking about the scale of production for an aircraft of this kind or whether it is going to work as it should. They require a product that works seamlessly to be able to focus on their job — keeping that plane in the air!
In the same way, businesses require technology tools that ‘just work.’ Great technology doesn’t get between you and your goals. It melts away into the background. These systems shouldn’t be seen. They don’t need to be exciting or flashy, rather, they should operate discretely seamlessly.
At Willow, we see the importance of building technology and providing services that do exactly this. It’s our bold mission to make the lives of people easier and connect them to the built world.
Dropbox and Salesforce are examples of platforms that we’ve come to take for granted because they ‘just work.’ They allow us not only to do our jobs, but to achieve a state of flow. When we are in this state of flow we can thrive and achieve great things.
No longer do you need to spend valuable hours scouring through files and folders looking for important documents. Within seconds, Dropbox enables you to access the files you are looking for and keep the productivity flowing.
