You know, typically, I try to avoid scary stories. I’m not….. I’ve never been great in the aftermath of watching horror films. I usually let my imagination run too far, which ends up with me not sleeping for a couple of days because as soon as I sleep, the evil clown under my bed will get me…..or something like that. That being said (and because my wife reminded me of this), I’m going to deep dive into one of the scarier stories that I have ever come across. Puts on creepy witch costume and voice SO GATHER ROUND THE CAMP FIRE CHILDREN AS I TELL THE STORY OF……THE FILING SYSTEM THAT WASN’T!!!!!
It’s a dark and stormy night. I open the Space Grey Macbook Air before me and take a deep breath. I’d answered the plaintive cry in the night for File management assistance and for me to put on my IT cowl, and so I came running. I open the program before me, and I feel the cold knife of betrayal cut through my heart. My own wife…how could she betray me like this? There’s absolutely no organizational structure whatsoever. No folders, no dates. Nothing. Just a massive folder with hundreds of files, and she wants me to help find “the right one” Why does she need and folders or file organization? She asks me; she thinks she can just do a keyword search. Can our marriage survive????
All teasing aside, I started telling her of the three most straightforward things that she could have done to make her filing system easier to use. She then told me to back off with that look in her eye, which told me that she had no problem sending me to sleep on the couch that night. Being the loving, dutiful husband, I left her to her own devices (Pun intended) because I love and respect her…..BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN I CAN’T TELL YOU ABOUT IT!!!! There are three REALLY simple things that you can do to have a much more efficient system.
1) File Naming Conventions – This is the easiest thing in the world as far as saving files is concerned. I’ve talked more about this on this blog than anything else, but just for a quick refresher; The three elements of a useful file name have the date in front (Preferably in the sequence YYY-MM-DD, so it sorts properly), a heading title, so you know what it’s about (Say for example “bills”) and then the file name which is what the thing is all about (So “Phone bill). When you put all those things together, you will get something that looks like “2021-01-28 – Bills – Phone Bill.” If you want to be particularly nerdy, you can put how much you owe on the phone bill, but that’s entirely up to you. Following these simple rules is an effortless way to sort your files, even if you want to keep them in one massive folder.
2) Using Folders effectively – If you don’t want to have every single file in your filing system pilled up in a single place (eye twitch), then the next logical step is the use of folders and subfolders. This is where part of your naming convention can come into play. A simple way of figure it out your folder names is to use the heading names. I certainly have a “bills” folder in my filing system. I like having a place to put both the bills that come in and my payments for those bills. If you want to use Subfolders, then you can subdivide the files as you see fit.
3) Archiving Old Files – If you’re going to use folders to separate your files, It’s nice to have the most relevant files at the top of the page. Because you have (hopefully) put the file’s date in the file name, the more files you have in your one folder, the further down your most recent files will be pushed. There are two solutions to this. Either change the sort so that the newest files show up on top, or archive your old files. The way that I archive my files is my year. So all of my bills for each year get their subfolder. This makes it so that If I need to find info for a particular year, it’s fairly easy to find. Depending on how many files you have, you can sort just by year, or you can sub sort by year and then by month. It’s entirely up to you.
There are a few things that freak me out in this world. Snakes, roller coasters, the sudden stop at the end of a long fall are all things that freak me out. The one thing that really scares me is a filing system where the person using it cannot quickly find their information. It’s so easy to set up your information so that you can easily use it that there is no reason for you to hold your files in an unorganized fashion…Unless, of course, it’s my wife trying to bother me. Oh well, They say opposites attract.
On a scale of “my wife’s system” to 10, how organized is your system?
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