Naming and organising files

Unless you have the rare privilege of starting an office filing system from scratch, you’re here because your organisation is now big and old enough that the files are a disorganised disaster.

Your team is not big enough to dedicate a staff member to the problem or pay for a specialised document management software like the lawyers and rocket scientists. But everyone agrees staff time is being wasted looking for stuff we’re pretty sure exists.

This is my suggested approach to filing for people in this situation. The zen of having a documented system is you get to stop thinking about filing. The right low key system makes filing and finding an easy, passive part of the day, not a creative act. When a question comes up, the system should have an answer.

What follows is a long explanation of an approach that, in practice, is a small set of conventions and habits.

What makes a good filing system?

To be able, without having to talk to anyone, to:

• Confidently add, move and remove files
• Find what you’re looking for
• Know who to ask when you can’t find something
• Avoid conflict about filing and organising.

We also want the system to strike the right balance of stability and flexibility. It should have an answer to “How do I file this new thing?” but not be so rigid you’re changing the rules regularly.

Naming

I’ve found thinking about the life expectancy of a file or folder—how long you expect it will continue to be edited—is the best way to determine how to name and store it. Meet the five types of files in the average office.

1. Living files

Living files are those you plan to continue editing for the foreseeable future. These are the important files you return to again and again like rolling agendas, coordination lists or internal manuals.

• Media log.xlsx
• Office handbook.docx
• Current projects.xlsx

Life expectancy? Long. A living file will become a working file only when your processes change.

Naming. A short, memorable name capitalising only the first letter. Take the same approach to naming top-level, frequently used folders.

2. Working files and folders

Working files are your bread and butter: We start a task, we make some files, edit them, send them round, edit some more, finish the task and likely never use that bundle of files again except for reference. One-off notes or a particular instance of a template are examples of working files.

Life expectancy? After a new version is created or a project finishes, they become essentially read only.

Naming. Name a working file with the date of creation in internationally standard YYYY-MM-DD format before a short sentence case name followed by the version.

• 2021-12-13 Christmas newsletter draft v0.1.docx

Starting each working file and folder with the date is good for several reasons:

• The date makes correctly ordering each list of files or folders a simple matter of sorting alphabetically by name. This is necessary because sorting by ‘creation’ or ‘modification’ date is unreliable, particularly when syncing tools like OneDrive and Google Drive often mangle them.
• Files become easier to search. If you know when something happened but not what it was called, searching for, say, “2025-04” reliably yields every folder or file from that month at once.
• The standard format makes scanning a list of file names easier.
• People love making up their own date formats. If you don’t set a norm, they will freelance, adding noise with none of the preceeding benefits.

Include “v0.1” after the name of all files you create unless you’re certain it will have no significant revisions. This preserves alphabetical sorting when you create new versions. Optionally, label each version with a note after the version number.

• 2022-04-11 Runsheet v0.2.xslx
• 2024-02-01 Animal welfare report v0.1.docx
• 2024-02-01 Animal welfare report v0.2 - Elsa edits.docx
• 2024-02-01 Animal welfare report v0.3 - Approved by Anna.docx
• 2025-04-08 April newsletter v0.1.docx

Don’t go overboard with the labels. They’re most useful for answering questions like “Which version was sent to the Board?”

We start at v0.1 rather than v1 because having 10 or more versions of a document is scarily common: Versions v0.1, v0.2, …, v1.1 would sort correctly when alphabetised, whereas v1, v2, …, v11 would go out of order. If you have more than 99 versions of something, good luck.

Working folders follow the same convention without the version number.

• 2024-11-12 IWD Breakfast photos
• 2020-02-10 JobKeeper campaign proposal

Bundling everything related to a unit of work—a task, a publication, a project, an event, whatever—saves you having to get finicky about naming the files within. Doing this right lets you quickly handle working files, outputs, alien material and junk without sacrificing searchability.

I’ve found having many working folders with good names is nearly always an easier system to work with over the long run compared to deeply nested folder structures.

3. Outputs

Outputs are the shareable versions of working files, usually PDFs or images.

Life expectancy? Never edited once published. You can always reproduce an output from working files, so it’s rarely a problem if they’re deleted.

Naming. Try to give outputs the same name as the working file they were exported from. This avoids the question “Which version of the Word doc is this PDF from?”

• 2025-02-01 Animal welfare report.pdf
• 2023-08-06 Annual Report 2022-23 [As published online].pdf
• Team photo - low res.jpg

When you need a plain name for external audiences—e.g. Annual Report 2023-24.pdf—I suggest labelling that version

4. Alien material

Files produced by other people that we need to keep a hold of, usually just for reference.

Life expectancy? Usually never edited, but filed for reference during a task or because your accountant needs you to hold onto files like invoices. Some alien material becomes junk after a task is finished.

Naming. Don’t be afraid to rename alien material to suit yourself. If reformatting a date or removing all caps minimises noise in file names, go for it. Grouping all the external material for a task in one working folder is usually a good idea.

• invoice-38582636-3ea6-4484-86e7-b9e2a337eeaf.pdf
• RAYTHEON ANNUAL REPORT 1994-95.pdf
• 20230223-Eventbrite_attendees.csv

5. Junk

You know what junk is. Classics include “Reports.zip” hanging around next to the now-unzipped “Reports” folder or a “reference(1).docx” lurking next to “reference.docx”.

Life expectancy? Momentarily useful at best.

Junk hangs around when we’re lazy or not confident deleting things. Old junk attains an air of mystery. People operate under a malign version of the ‘leave all gates as found’ rule, not wanting to delete what they don’t understand despite the empty spreadsheet in the “Photos” folder obviously being junk.

The preceeding conventions help make junk stand out so we can remove it.

Naming. Do not name these files, delete them.

Rules to make this work

Now we have a way to name and handle files of all stripes, there are just a few rules to make the whole approach sing.

Make one person explicitly responsible for each top-level folder

Top-level folders are the first layer of folders.

If you only take one bit of advice from reading this page, this is the one to take. For example, Elsa is your comms person with responsibility for the top-level “Communications” and “Media” folders. As long as she doesn’t needlessly break any of the expectation set by this system, she can adapt the structure to suit her and as the work changes. As Chief of Staff, Anna owns the “Strategy” folder and knows to ask Elsa if they can’t find what they’re looking for in “Communications.”

Create working folders often and otherwise avoid creating new folders

Don’t guess at your future needs either. If a folder is only going to have one item in it to start, you don’t need the folder yet.

The smoothest filing experience I’ve had filing in policy and comms roles is having “Working files” folder with hundreds of working folders.

Organise files by project not content type

You have a “Correspondance” folder and a “Bingbop Research Project” folder. Where should I put “2023-10-02 Letter about Bingbop.docx”? In “Bingbop Research Project” because it keeps the working file with its context. In most teams, you’re also far more likely to be asked “show me all the files related to that project” than “show me all the letters”.

Keep the folder structure flat

It’s better to have fewer folders with lots of items than a deeply-nested structure that’s harder to remember and navigate. At some point you’re going to have to manually look through a bunch of files, this approach will make that much faster.

“Archive” folders can be safely ignore

There is one special folder name: “Archive.” This name tells someone looking for a file they should ignore material in the folder. You should be able to wake to find every folder named “archive” has been deleted and not have a care in the world.

Bad filing habits

Finally, these are the seven most common filing anti-patterns to avoid:

1. Anything in a file name that pretends it’s the final version.
2. Trying to make living files more prominent but using capitalisation or tricks to affect sorting like putting an exalamation mark at the start of a name.
3. Randomly including your organisation’s name in the title of internal files and folders. Everyone there knows where you work, it’s just noise.
4. Category errors. A ‘fruits’ folder with subfolders ‘bananas’, ‘apples’, ‘vegetables’ and ‘pears’ is annoying and erodes everyone’s confidence in the system when it happens repeatedly.
5. Needless subfolders. The classic example is grouping by year. It’s perfectly fine for an “Events” folder to contain dozens of working folders like “2022-04 Election panel” and “2023-12 Christmas party” instead of grouping them into a subfolder for each year.
6. Emailing attachments when you could send an editable link.
7. Creating a new sheet within your current Excel workbook instead of a fresh workbook. If you have “Campaign contact main list.xlsx” and add a “December event invites” to it, you can’t search for it easily and later visitors will have no idea its there when digging around.

Good luck.