I used to laugh at the idea of using a tablet for on-site markups, but my old boss in Phoenix changed my mind

For years, I was a paper and red pen guy. I thought bringing a tablet to a job site was just for show, something for people who wanted to look fancy. Then, about six months ago, my boss handed me an iPad with a specific drafting app already loaded. He said, 'Just try it for the Johnson remodel, the one with all the custom millwork.' I was annoyed but did it. Having the full set of plans, the shop drawings, and the ability to drop notes and arrows right on the PDF in real time while talking to the carpenter... it cut our revision time in half. No more lost scraps of paper, no more misreading my own handwriting back at the office. I went from a skeptic to a convert in about three days. Has anyone else had a tool or method they fought against that actually made their workflow way better?

4 comments

4 Comments

wren6382mo ago

Wasn't the stubbornness the worst part? I had the same fight with cloud storage for project files. I insisted on my external hard drive, said it was safer, until it failed the day before a big client meeting. Being able to pull everything from any computer felt like cheating. Why did I waste so much time being scared of it?

karen_sanchez491mo ago

Nah, I gotta disagree a bit. Sometimes that manual approach saves you from lazy mistakes that slip through automated systems. There's something to be said for feeling the process in your hands rather than trusting a black box to get it right.

knight.dylan2mo ago

Stubbornness is a real tax, like @wren638 said.

sage_green2mo ago

Oh man, "waste so much time being scared of it" hits hard. I did the exact same thing with automatic bill pay. I was so sure I needed to manually log in and approve every single payment, convinced the system would mess up. I probably spent hours over the years doing that, just for the peace of mind. Then I finally tried it and it's just... fine. Everything gets paid. I created a whole job for myself out of pure stubbornness.

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