Where did I save that document? I’ve searched every term… what did I call it? If you’re losing files, confusing files or not functioning well in the digital world, our IT guru will help you learn how to file in a paper-less world.
Video:
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Podcast:
[powerpress]
Video Transcript:
Hi. Craig Lambie here, the Chief IT Guru at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. This week I’m going to introduce a paperless office series. We already did one on back-up. I’m going to do naming conventions and filing methodology which I’m going to talk about today which will bring together your paperless office which is going to save you lots of costs in printing and paper and all sorts of headaches that you have when you’re going to print to a printer which I’m happy to say I don’t have to do very much anymore.
The first thing that we’re going to talk about is ‘Printing to PDF’. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. When you’re printing a document if you can print to PDF first then you can look at it, make sure it’s all exactly what you want before you actually send it off to the printer if you have to print it. Otherwise if it’s just for filing then having that good back-up system which I’ve talked about in the past will insure that you never lose a document.
Then you use a naming convention in order to ensure that it’s easy to find those documents again and finally which is the topic for today is the filing methodology. I use this one and I recommend you do too. For receipts and invoices and things like that that you need to keep track off: have it in a folder called Documents. Underneath that you can create another folder for each month of the year. I do it by year so 2014 is the current year. Under that I have a folder named July. I don’t just call it July. I use the naming convention ‘07’ for the month number so they go in order and then I put the word July because I recognize that more than the 07. It just makes it easier.
Then inside that you should store your files using the naming convention year, month, day and then whatever the file is. The name of the file whether it’s an invoice, who it’s for, all those sorts of information. The more information you put into the file name the easier it will be to find later on. If you use the filing methodology and apply a similar rule across your projects, across all sorts of things then I really recommend doing that because it’s going to be easier to find things.
The other thing with the filing methodology is that you can create a folder structure that you might use inside a project. You can have folders like ‘contacts’, ‘quotes’, ‘invoices’, ‘reports’ etc. the way you do that is you create a set of blank folders that you call as a template. Then when you create a new project you just copy that template folder across into the other folder, so you’ve got the exact same structure under all of your project folders.
Do you follow? I know it’s a little bit complex. It’s very left brain but it’s very logical if you think it through. It will make it so much easier to find your files when all of your projects are under the same structure.
That’s this week’s Hot Tip. If you felt that this was helpful for you please like this video. If you think you know somebody that would get a lot of benefit out of this video please share it with them. I’m sure they’ll like to hear about it. If you’ve got any questions or comments please write them below.
This week I’d like you to tell me what naming convention or filing methodology you use in order to organize your digital life. Here in the Incubator we want you to more than survive we want you to thrive. In order to thrive you need to subscribe and get more of these tips every Tuesday and I’ll see at the next one.