Sometimes being able to find something isn’t enough. You need to be able to get to it too.
Last week I was sitting on a straw bale on the Acorn Stage at Ideas Fest, talking about being a mum and building a business alongside four other women from the MumsWhoBuild community.
IdeasFest took place in the middle of the Hertfordshire countryside.
And there was no Wi-Fi.
This week I’m in Devon on our annual break for my husband Gary’s birthday. We come every year, when the beaches are a little quieter, the weather is usually still fairly good and the school holiday prices have gone back down.
The Wi-Fi, however, is as beautifully unreliable as ever.
Two completely different places and two occasions when I needed information I would normally expect to be able to get to on my phone.
At IdeasFest, it was my ticket.
In Devon, it was our booking information.
Neither is particularly remarkable. They’re exactly the sort of things most of us now keep digitally without giving it much thought.
And that works brilliantly.
Until there’s no connection.
Think about how much important information we no longer carry around with us physically.
Tickets arrive by email. Hotel and holiday bookings sit in apps. Insurance information is online. Travel documents are digital. Appointments, confirmations and reference numbers are scattered across inboxes and accounts.
In many ways, life admin has become much easier because of it.
But somewhere along the way, we’ve also become used to the idea that if something exists on our phone, we can get to it.
Those aren’t quite the same thing.
You can know exactly where something is and still find yourself standing in a field watching a little wheel go round and round because your phone can’t connect to it.
And, of course, that tends to happen at the point when you actually need the information.
We talk a lot about keeping important information safe and making it easy to find.
There’s another part of that which matters too: making sure it is available when you need it.
That was something we considered when we built Doqit.
If there’s something stored in Doqit that you know you’re going to need, you can make it available offline and save it securely to your phone.
It could be an event ticket, a booking confirmation, a document you need while travelling or a copy of your ID.
You simply open the document in Doqit and switch on Available offline. You can then access it from your phone even if you don’t have Wi-Fi or mobile data.
It’s a small bit of preparation for something we’ve all become rather bad at anticipating: being disconnected.
Technology has made so much of our lives easier. But real life doesn’t always provide perfect conditions.
Wi-Fi drops out. Mobile signal disappears. Apps won’t load. Batteries run low. The information you thought you could pull up in seconds suddenly isn’t there.
A system for managing life admin has to take some account of that.
Because the point isn’t simply to have important information stored somewhere.
It needs to be there when you need it.
So before I go somewhere where I know the connection might be questionable, I now think about what I’m likely to need when I get there.
Not everything.
Just the important things I don’t want to be standing around trying to retrieve without a signal.
Because sometimes being able to find something isn’t enough.
You need to be able to get to it too.
Doqit is the system households rely on to make sure nothing gets missed.
Founded by Catherine Ann Reid and built from lived experience, Doqit was created to take the weight of life admin off people's shoulders; not by helping them "get organised", but by giving them a system that works with the reality of modern life.
It connects documents, information and deadlines in one place, so everything is easy to find, simple to manage, and there when it's needed most.
From insurance policies and passports to school records and medical information, Doqit keeps track of the details that matter, helping people stay on top of the things that are easy to forget but difficult to live without.
Doqit. Nothing missed. Nothing lost... even when there's no Wi-Fi!
Published: 15th September 2026