Why you waste your time finding stuff?

Daily Blog Thirty/365

Because you don’t do documentation.

The basic and the most essential skill you should have irrespective of your work or personal lifestyle is documentation. I know so many people who cannot find anything when they need it the most. It just kills me when I ask for something at work, and my coordinator starts searching for it in their outlook mailbox. How can you be so dumb not to realize that you can keep every document organized and clean with the state of technology we’re in. I mean seriously, how long does it take to save something in their respective folder. If you have received an order from your customer, just keep it in the customer name folder along with the price calculation excel. And when you get their VAT certificate after few days for invoicing. Save it in the folder. You don’t need to ask me every time to provide their VAT certificate.

Naming the file correctly is crucial. Having tens of files named Book1 is, to be honest, stupid. There are a few discussions which you need to have with yourself.

• If you receive a file in email ask yourself if you will need it in the future for reference. Mostly it will be yes. Don’t let it stay in your email. Name the file so that it is easy for you to find and save it in a respective folder.
• If you’re calculating the amount for a price proposal, ask yourself if you should keep the calculation for future. of course the answer should be yes. If its a No, whats wrong if you dude. I name the excel file with the date and whenever there is a revision I just need to make changes of about 10 secs and save it as “_01” revision. SIMPLE.

Again, always remember to rename the file according to its context.

Again, Save Everything somewhere safe.

I have two types of files. One is those who are saved on my MacBook, the once which are collected in Macbook directly gets saved in iCloud as well. The other types of files are the one which I keep on an app as well. (currently on Notion). You can use any software of your choice to manage your documents. Notion, Evernote, Trello, Omnifocus, etc. there are literally hundreds of them.

Initially, it may seem exciting, and you would tend to save anything and everything there. It’s not a bad thing but you won’t continue that for you and will feel you’re not following with your procedure correctly. That’s why it’s better you save things which you know you will really need in the future for reference or for documentation purposes.

See you tomorrow.

Cheers