When it comes to electronic filing there are two extremes that I have come across in working with clients. Number 1 – putting everything in My Documents. Number 2 – almost every document has its own folder.

Even though it’s fairly obvious let’s have a quick look why either of these options doesn’t work and what a better solution would be.

Having everything in My Documents is like chucking every piece of paper you own in one single box. And then trying to find it again. Ouch. Granted, you can sort My Documents alphabetically or by date with the click of a button (unlike the cardboard box) but that’s pretty much it. If you have a lot of files to deal with having them all in one folder is not very productive. Yes of course, there is a search function. But what if you can’t remember what you called the document or spreadsheet? Depending on your naming conventions (the name you give a file when you save it) you might never find the file you’re looking for again. You have to remember details about the file, so that you can find it by content, and if that fails, you’ll have to recreate the file or ask for it again if you didn’t create it in the first place.

Using a system with myriads of folders containing dozens of subfolders which in turn contain more dozens of subfolders can be similarly unproductive. If your system is so convoluted that you need a handbook to navigate through it you will find it very difficult again to quickly access a desired file.

The solution is a happy medium. But first you have to do some thinking. You could either do that on paper or on the computer, maybe using mind mapping or bulleted lists, whatever your preferred thinking tool. Create the top categories, which will become your folders that live on the drive or directly within My Documents. Then subdivide them into suitable subfolders. These subfolders can have another subdivision but don’t go much deeper than that. Three levels of folders is usually enough for most businesses.

If you create logical top categories and enough of them, you will make it much easier for yourself to find documents when you need to retrieve them. This is after all the primary reason for filing. If you know you will never need a file again, you might as well save yourself some time and storage capacity and delete it.

A quick word about naming of files: create a name that describes the file well so that when you come across it several months later you know what you’re looking at without having to open it first. Long gone are the computer days when you only had 8 characters available to name a file and you had to be extremely creative and cryptic. You now have up to 260 characters available. This however includes the path name (the folders and subfolders where the file is stored). And the only things you can’t use in a file name are these symbols: \ / ? : * ” > < |

So go and have a look at your electronic filing system. If it takes too long to locate files, it might be worth spending a bit of time to set up a new, more efficient filing system that will save you a lot of time in the long run.