Let me paint you a picture.

It’s Friday afternoon. Your team has just wrapped up a productive week. Reports filed, clients happy, inbox under control. A good week.

Except , it wasn’t really a four-day week.

It was a three-day week. With a Friday spent searching.

A McKinsey report put a number on something most of us already knew: office workers spend around 19% of their working week just looking for information. That’s nearly a full day. Every week. Gone.

Not on a project. Not on a client. On hunting. For things that should already be findable.

Sound familiar?

You need the expenses policy. You check SharePoint. You find three versions, none of them dated. You ask Dave in Ops , he thinks it might be in the Finance folder, or possibly the HR one, or there might be a newer one that someone emailed round in February.

You find something. You’re not sure it’s current. You use it anyway and hope for the best.

Or maybe you’re the new starter. It’s your first week. You’ve been told “everything’s on SharePoint.” You open SharePoint. It looks like someone digitised a skip.

Folders called New Folder (3). Documents called Report_Final_v2_USETHISONE_updated. A site structure that presumably made sense to whoever built it in 2016, but has since evolved , organically, chaotically, inevitably , into something that would give Indiana Jones pause.

Welcome to the team.

Here’s the thing though. This isn’t a technology problem.

SharePoint is actually pretty good. I know, I know , that’s not what people usually say. But the platform itself is capable of doing everything an organisation needs: storing documents, enabling collaboration, surfacing information quickly, supporting working across teams.

The problem isn’t the tool. It’s how we’ve been using it.

Most SharePoint sites get built by someone who thinks in systems rather than in people. The structure mirrors the org chart. Finance here, HR there, Operations in the corner. Logical, tidy, very sensible.

Completely useless for the person who just needs to find the staff handbook.

Because here’s the thing: nobody thinks “I need to navigate to Human Resources > Policies > Current > Approved.” They think where’s the staff handbook? And if they can’t find it quickly, they give up, they ask someone, or they spend twenty minutes not doing the thing they actually needed to do.

The filing cabinet had one advantage

Back in the day , and I mean this , the filing cabinet was honest. You knew it was organised by someone’s logic. You knew you’d have to open a drawer and look. You developed a feel for it.

The problem with modern digital storage is that it promises to be better. Search! Cloud access! Everything in one place!

And then you type “expenses” into SharePoint search and get 847 results.

So you end up doing what Indian Railways apparently still does with their paper archives: keeping a parallel system. Just in case. Your own folder. Your own copies. Your own version of the truth.

Which means the next person who needs that document is back to square one.

Three clicks. That’s the target.

Not as some kind of arbitrary rule. As a design discipline.

If any document or resource your staff regularly needs can’t be found in three clicks or fewer , something’s wrong with the structure, not the person looking for it.

When I rebuild SharePoint for organisations, I start not with the technology but with the people. What do they actually look for? How do they think about it? What words do they use? The structure follows those answers , not the org chart, not the way it’s always been done, not the preferences of the person who happened to set it up first.

The difference when it’s done well is immediate and measurable. Staff find things. They trust the system. The informal workarounds , the “ask Dave,” the personal folders, the emailed copies , start to fade.

You get your Friday back.

Want to know how your organisation is doing? The KIM Scorecard takes about five minutes and gives you a clear picture of where things stand. There’s also a Team version if you want to know what your staff actually experience.

Or just get in touch. I’m always happy to talk about this stuff , it’s something of an obsession.

Jon Wellman is the founder of 3Clicks, helping organisations in the VCSE sector rebuild their information systems so staff can find what they need , fast.