How to gain hours per week by better organizing your Drive
Many of us want to be more productive, and many of us are managing files and folders. In the 2000s, everyone had his own computer and was just sharing a few files. Now, shared files systems such as Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, or Amazon Drive are more and more common. Organizing his documents becomes critical as soon as the Drive / folder is shared with a group of several people, typically a startup or a company. You need to define clear rules about how to organize the information inside this Drive, otherwise it becomes a mess very quickly.
Daily life of an office worker
Who has never spent too much time searching for a file? That happens every day, not only because your colleague Steve has put his Google Sheets document in the wrong folder. That happens also because he has forgotten to put it on the Drive, or simply because you have no clue about the keyword you need to type to search for this document.
So, what happens? You need to open the document, you know the ones with the table of clients but you don’t know where it is. So you go through your folder tree and search but that does not give anything. Let’s try the Search with a keyword, and you have no result. So you try another keyword, and you have 215 results (which is a bit too much). As you are persistent, you ask you colleague Patricia, who is nice to tell you where it is. Result: you have lost 5 minutes (+2 min for Patricia).
If you feel this is your daily life, that means that with this issue several times per day, you lose a few hours per week. But this can be avoided. Let me tell you how.
Organizing or searching
Some people think they can simply have a big folder with all files mixed. That can work in certain situations, when there are just a few users during a short period of time. But for any team building an ambitious project on the long-term, caring about a structured organization of files is required.
So over the years I have developed a technique to be able to :
- Create a file tree / folder tree that is simple and logic ;
- Know how to name properly your folders and files ;
- Know exactly where you must classify each file and each folder.
First, what does MECE mean?
The MECE Principle is concept coming from the consulting firm McKinsey in the 60s. MECE stands for Mutually Exclusive & Collectively Exhaustive. It is initially used to divide a problem into subproblems where each subproblem is independent from the other (= Mutually Exclusive) and where the reason of the problem is necessarily inside one of the subproblem (=Collectively Exhaustive). When the problem is divided with the MECE principle, each subproblem is like a piece of a puzzle.
Actually, this MECE principle is a good framework that can be also applied to the organization of files and directories on a Google drive and on your computer. This is what I use.
Step 1 — Create MECE folders.
When you apply this MECE principle to files, that means that you should create a structure of folders where each file has 1 location, and 1 location only.
For example, at the root of my Documents folder, I have the following:
Any document that I keep / use will go to one of these folders:
- “Myself” contains administrative information about me, my health, my kids.
- “Work” contains information about work: diplomas, CV…
- “Money” contains information about bank or taxes.
- “Accommodation” is a folder for the flat, insurance, electricity…
- “Purchases” has information about things I have purchased (invoices, user manuals, aftersales issues…)
- “Leisure” is where I store information about travels, cooking, going out…
- “Thoughts” is a folder to store things I want to read or that I write.
- “Photo” could be inside Leisure but as it is a big passion, I made a dedicated folder.
- “Entrepreneurship” is where I store some business ideas, meetups, business cards, or projects. This is also the place where I put my work files.
From this example you can see that it is possible to create a MECE folder organization so that any file has 1 place, and only 1. Then, each folder is organized in the same way with the subfolders. Of course you need a temporary folder, that can be called “Download”.
So the tricky part of this technique is how to create this MECE structure. It is not obvious, particularly at the beginning. But it is an excellent mental discipline that forces you to structure what you collect and produce. And once you get used to it, it becomes easy and amazingly powerful.
Step 2 — Rank and name your folders/files.
It is important that you give appropriate names to the folders and files you have. First, the name will corresponds clearly to the content of the file/folder. And then, you will be able to sort the documents in a logic way. So be proactive, and don’t let your computer manage the names or the order of the files. My advice is to use a figure to start the folder name, as you choose the order of the folders.
In the previous example, you see that “01 - Myself” is something that goes first — it is just me, without any work or money. Then you have “02 - Work”, then I can get “Money” from it, then have a “House” from the money, then purchase things, etc. So the order exists and it is actually logic. And yes for this example, it corresponds to the Maslow pyramid.
Once you have chosen an appropriate order you can simply name your folders or files starting with the corresponding figure. You must set your computer so that files are organized by alphabetical order.
Another example with the Drive of my company
On the Drive of my company, Kombo, there are 5 folders:
- “Admin” corresponds to the administrative part: creation of the company, taxes, accounting, contracts, administrative information of team members…
- “Management” includes everything, which is related to managing the company: hiring (applications of candidates, hiring tests, job descriptions…), meeting summaries, processes, or fun to keep photos of our events.
- “Product” folder contains all files/folders to manage the development of the product, which is in our case, a website.
- The folder “Marketing” has all the files to manage the marketing. Other companies can have a folder for sales, but as a B2C company, we don’t.
- “Finance” is the folder dedicated to the financial part, which is all the information related to how the company manages its funding : history, forecast, investors, capitalization table…
Step 3 — Name the folders/files corresponding to projects.
Sometimes, there is a better way of naming the folders / files, particularly when new things are added regularly in a folder. Let’s call those news things “projects”, as they are time defined. In other words, they have a limited lifetime. Those projects can be clients’ projects that will last 4 months, several versions of a design of a new user interface, contracts with suppliers, monthly folders with photos of your friends, or weekly meeting reports.
Each project has a date and then it is more convenient to organize them by date than with a number, as the number would not be logic. This works when you set your computer to organize the files by name, alphabetically.
How to start this organization of your files?
As every big project or challenge, divide it in small steps to make it easy. Here you can just start by a Project folder you use a lot. There, name all folders and documents as explained above. Once you appreciate this technique, you will do it for your computer.
And for the Drive ? Ask the colleagues who share the same Drive if they would be interested in setting up this technique.
