Shakespeare may have been right, a rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but in my world, a rose by any other name will get misfiled. The one major flaw that I see in most file naming systems is the naming conventions that people use. It’s completely understandable; people can call the same document or picture three or four different terms, but for a filing system that can mean total system collapse.
For example, if you have a document that you use to acknowledge that you can live in an apartment what you would call that document? A Lease? A deal document? A Rental Agreement? These are all valid names for the same record. The problem comes from the fact that people can call the same thing two or even three different things. I have a few tips to allow you to streamline your filing system;
1) Use a consistent file naming convention – This may seem obvious, but unless you give files that are the same the same name, then finding them, later on, will be a nightmare. For example, if you have a phone bill from April and a phone bill from May, and you call the April bill “Phone bill” and the May bill “Bell Bill” then it will be much more challenging to find those bill later. In a personal system, this can be easy; you need to remember what you call things. In a professional filing system having consistent naming conventions is critical.
2) Create a folder Structure that’s Logical – on a personal filing system; it’s much simpler to be logical because likely as not, you are going to be the only person accessing it. Even though you may be the only person accessing your system, it still needs to make sense. If you go back day, weeks, or months later and you’ve forgotten when you put some of your files, then that’s not useful. If you have subfolders required, say for example if you want to keep all your phone bills by year, then one thing you can do to sort them out is to create a “year” sub-foldering system (2015/2016/2017/2018, etc.)
3) The K.I.S.S. Rule – To keep organized it’s much better to Keep Information Systems Simple. Starting with a basic set of categories where all documents can go. Setting up this “top-level” (or highest level of folders that all the files go into) folders to be as general as possible makes it easier to file things away in each folder. Things like “Bills” can be where all your bills go. Once the major categories are set up, you can set up a set of folders that are more specific. Tn the case of your “Bills” main folder you can have subcategories like “Phone Bill” “Hydro” or “Gas.” Depending on how ambitious you are you can further subdivide your categories by year or Months.
BONUS TIP: If you are going to separate by Month I would highly recommend setting up a set of folders by year….having two or more “January” folders can get confusing!
4) Start with the Date – I have rarely come across a document which doesn’t have a date on it, which makes the use of a date at the beginning of the file name even more important. If you are looking for bills from 2014 having the date up front makes it much easier for most search engines to find the documents in question. Typing out the whole date (i.e., December 19, 2005) is both times consuming and cumbersome, I would recommend having a simpler methodology. Having the date go Year-Month-Day approach, for example for March 12th, 2009 have it go 2009-03-12, makes it so that when you have a series of documents the system will sort the records for you.
Having a well-tuned digital filing system can be as complicated as you would like it. Like everything else in life it all depends on the user. To have a filing system that works both in the short term and the long run, you need to have a file naming system that will let your files be searchable, recognizable and consistent.
What do you use for your system?
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I agree totally – especially #4.
Having a consistent protocol is key.
Great article.
I completely agree proper filing system is needed. For some time now I’ve been including dates in my file names along with sub folders by years. Great article!
The Real Person!
Thank you so much for your comments! David, I’m curious. Do you in your file system go Year-Month-Day? If not what do you do and why?
Wow Jason you have a personal blog. This is awesome! I actually do something similar but I only started off with year YYYY – Subject – File Name (V1) MM.DD.YYYY
Looking forward to hearing more from you on data management topic.
The Real Person!
That’s interesting! I like doing YYY-MM-DD- file name because it groups the firs by year, and the by month and then by day
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