You know that exasperating feeling when you’re looking for a file on your computer or a shared company drive and can’t just find it? You know it’s there somewhere, yet you’re wasting time looking in all the wrong places. This means you likely don’t have consistent naming conventions for your files. Truthfully, many businesses don’t – and employees spend hundreds of hours a year on a frustrating mission that takes them away from their actual work.
Adopting consistent naming conventions may sound daunting, but it isn’t. Here are some tips:
Think about Business Operations First
Think about your business operations and then decide on a logical file structure. The names should reflect how your business files information. There is no “one size fits all” structure. It will be different for different companies, but everyone must understand and adopt it. Tips from York University include:
- Keeping file names short and meaningful
- Use capital letters to separate words. If you must use a separator, use dashes or underscores, not spaces.
- Date format by indicating the year first.
Read their full list of best practices here.
Note that the International Standardization Organization (ISO) describes an internationally accepted way to represent dates and times using numbers as YYYY-MM-DD.
Make It Obvious and Simple
Whatever you do, don’t make it overly complicated! Keep the file structure and file naming convention obvious and straightforward. If your system has too many rules, you’ll soon notice no one will use it, and they’ll start their own system. This can lead to file duplication and misfiling, and there is a risk of losing information altogether.
Go Slowly
Don’t overhaul everything at once. Implement the new naming conventions with your current files as soon as you can. You will likely have a large number of old files that you will need to overhaul, but don’t worry about those right away. You may want to move them into folders labelled by year. However, if you know you will need to reference old files, change the file name as soon as you can if they do not already have the standard naming convention.
Instead of spending your time going back to old files that you may never need to access, use your time more productively by changing only names on the files that you need now and moving forward. Then, when you have a few extra minutes, rename the older files.
To be highly productive at work, you need to be organized. By having proper naming conventions for your files, you can find information faster. This improves your workflow efficiency and your overall productivity. If you need help streamlining your workplace for success, contact us through our website to discuss how we can help.
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