File (document) Naming — How To
Good naming makes things easy to find at-a-glance later, by others and by your future self.
Naming is communication, and a good name clearly communicates its intent helps you understand what it contains, thus saving you time opening multiple files before you find the one you’re after.
Have you ever struggled to find an important document, even though you know “it’s in their somewhere”?
It’s not surprising this is happening now, when you learn that 90% of the world’s digital information has been created in just the last two years!
Documents are being added at a rapid and increasing rate, and the data they contain wasn’t created just for fun. It was intended to serve a purpose, and very likely to be shared with others — customer, client, colleague, government, community group, or family member.
With a little naming effort up front, your life will be easier in the long term.
Four recommendations
If you follow these tips, you’ll be able to do a search, scan the results quickly, and know whether you have found what you were looking for.
- Make the name long enough to be clear what is inside.
- Start with the high level categories and end with the lower level.
- Use date formats using numbers leading with four number Year, two number Month and two number Day.
- For other sequential numbering, set a leading zero 00, 01, 02 etc
Acme Corp Proposal 2020–09–14 2nd Brain training
In this example I’ll use the above filename for a document in my 2nd Brain system. From its name we know that it relates to Acme Corp, that it’s a Proposal given in Sep 2020 about 2nd Brain training.
Let me unpack these tips
Filename length
When I started with MS-DOS we could name a file with up to 8 characters, and another 3 characters for the extension, and a whole lot of other constraints! Imagine ACMEP2BT.DOC. Thankfully the upper limit is much higher (though sometimes the limit does include the characters that describe the file path).
This filename (above) is just 48 characters, including the spaces, which is acceptable in almost all software these days, so don’t feel constrained and add what you need to.
Start with high level categories
Acme Corp is the highest level category for this document and the lowest level is the project description of 2nd Brain Training.
If you use Tiago Forte’s Projects — Areas — Resources — Archives system of organising your digital life, the highest level category is probably the AREA the project belongs in, in this case Acme Corp. It ends with the project name, in this case 2nd Brain Training.
Date formats and numbers
For dates, using the YYYY-MM-DD format ensure that if you are ever sorting by date, no matter what century or decade you’re in, it will always sort sequentially.
For numbers, adding one or two leading zeros has the same effect. One zero for up to 99 instances, or two zeros for 100–999.
In conclusion
Imagine searching for acme corp proposal and being returned with this list:
Would that help make your life a little bit easier?
James Samuel shares his CORA (Capture, Organise, Refine, Action) project-centric information template, and coaches people wanting to organise and bring a projects and actions focus to their digital life.
