Tech has come a long way, especially in the past few decades. More and more companies are forming with increasingly innovative products, and grasping for their share of the market. After relentless nights, some of these companies succeed, and become mainstream products for the masses to use. Others fold and collapse into a graveyard of intellectual property, and non-scalable businesses.

Some other traditional companies wait on the side lines to see what the hot new product is. It could beanew communication tool like slack, or a task management app, such as Trello. Companies begin to use these tools and begin to wonder: How were ever able to manage without these tools? Thank god someone came along and built this for us. Now our working lives are much easier.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. Companies, even if they are not tech companies, should not wait for that sexy new calendar extension before they increase their productivity by 10%. No. Just No. These companies should be taking their destiny into their own hands and start creating their own internal tools. Of course, if it already exists, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. However, if the employees are doing the same thing every day/week/month, and using a bespoke tech tool could increase productivity by 15%… waiting for the answer to come onto the market, is clearly not the answer.

Yes, I know not everyone is a giant tech company with unlimited resources, fisting tech into places they don’t need to be. These tools don’t have to be super complex. Let’s come up with 2 ideas right now –

• Right… something that bothers me when I work is a lack of responsiveness from pretty much everyone. How about I get a software development agency to create a tool for me that cycles through all the contact details of that person, from several emails, to WhatsApp, to calling and leaving a message. Once I send a message to that person, depending on the urgency that I need a reply, I it automatically sends messages on other platforms after a certain periodof time. Sounds annoying, I agree. But still, useful.
• Another thing –this one may be genuinely ridiculous –an intuitive AI that scrapes relevant data from all of your tools, whether it be dropbox, slack, trello, email, files on your computer, based on the description you give it.

I was able to come up with these crazy ideas in ten minutes. Imagine what a company with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of employees could do if they spent more time thinking about using tech to improve their working lives.

Some companies may come back to me and say “Nathan, ain’t nobody got time for that”. I’d simply respond “maybe an internal tool can solve that”.