Speaker 1: Spending a few seconds to properly name your files will help you find your files more quickly later. And being consistent in how you name your files by following a naming convention will make it easier for you to identify the correct files, especially if you have multiple versions. And it'll also tell you how the files relate to the other files in your folder. My name is Andy Park. Welcome to this channel on Productivity. In this video, I'll show you some of the best practices used in file naming and share with you how I name my files. File Naming Best Practices Consistency is key. Choose a naming convention that works and stick with it. Whether you choose to start the file name with a date, a number, or keywords, be consistent, at least within the specific folder. If your files are named inconsistently, you won't be able to sort or easily see the relationship between the files. Best Practices Be descriptive in the file name, but keep it short. Best practice is to stay below 25 characters. I recall reading an article where the author says to think of what keywords your future self might use to try to find the file and include all those keywords in the file name. I think this is a lazy way to name your files. And as a matter of fact, you'll probably spend more time and effort entering in all the possible keywords that you may or may not remember. A short descriptive file name should suffice. Many of the search tools these days search within the file's metadata and the content itself, so some of the keywords you're thinking of may already be included in the file anyway. Avoid spaces or special characters in a file name. This is something that consistently shows up in many file naming best practices. It has to do with compatibility with different systems, especially legacy systems that treat spaces either as delimiters or convert them to other characters like a percentage sign. Personally, I've been freely using spaces in my file name at least for the past five years without any issues. If you know that there's a chance that your file will be used in other systems, then avoid using spaces in your file name. Otherwise, I think it's safe to use them. But the special characters, I would avoid them altogether. Use a date format that starts with the year, month, then date. Whether you put the numbers together or separate them by hyphens and underscores is entirely up to you, but place the year, month, then date in that order. This will ensure that your files can be correctly sorted. Include a modification or version number if you're working on a file where multiple revisions are made. You may include a version 1 or version 2 in the file name. You can also indicate the stage that the document is in, whether it's in the draft stage, the final stage, or if the document has been signed and executed in the case of a legal document like a contract. Another way to use a modification is for usage occasions. You may have different file versions for whether you're sharing with a group as a pre-read versus a version used for presentation to the finance team versus presentation to the steering committee. And lastly, if there are multiple contributors to a file and each are working on a separate file, you can include the author in the file name. Generally, the first initial of their first name and the full last name works best. So these are some of the best practices used in file naming. I'm going to show you some examples of how I apply them in my own practice. But before we get into that, let's talk about the folder structure for a moment. Personally, I'm against using elaborate tree structure like this. If you're too specific in setting up folders and subfolders for every little thing, it's hard to decide where to place the files and harder still to remember where you place them. For example, let's say I have a document that pertains to managing theft in a retail store. Should I place that document in ops policies and procedures, in loss prevention directives, or inventory shrink? Having an elaborate tree structure can be confusing and counterproductive sometimes. Instead, I have a few folders created within my OneDrive documents folder. These folders, like the one that I have set up for retail, represent top-level subjects and I generally don't have any subfolders within them. If I name the files using some of the best practices mentioned earlier, it's easy enough for me to locate the files. Also, having all files in one folder makes it easy for me to see the relationship between the files and I can quickly sort and see all of the recent files that I've worked on. It's not to say that I don't use a tree structure at all, but I use them sparingly and for a deliberate purpose. So how do I name my files? In most cases, I start with keywords followed by the date and if needed, I'll add the modification or diversion number at the end. Let me share an example. I manage a lot of presentation files. Many of these presentations are recurring either weekly, monthly, or quarterly. So in this case, I'll use the meeting name to start. Then I'll add the date. And the date I use is not always the date when I modify the file. In this case, I'll use a presentation date. For modification, I use a short description to note the stage that the document is in or the usage occasion. Almost always, I need input from other team members in putting together the presentation. So the first stage of the file is when I create a presentation shell with different section dividers for the team to input into. So I'll give it a modification label, VShell. If the file is stored and shared via OneDrive or a team SharePoint site, all revisions will be tracked and I'll have access to the version history. So I generally don't bother with version 1, version 2, so on and so forth. Once all team members have added their slides, I'll save it with the modification VDraft, indicating that the file is ready for review and feedback. Once the presentation file has been updated to incorporate the feedback from the review sessions and finally aligned and approved, I'll save another version, VApprove. I often share pre-reads with the presentation attendees, especially if the file is content-rich or has a lot of data. That gets VPreread. Sometimes small changes are made from the pre-read to the final presentation. The actual file that gets presented in the meeting gets VPrez. By keeping the different file versions named this way, I know exactly which version was used for what purpose. This would be very difficult if we just simply use V1, V2, so on and so forth. So that's it. I've shared some of the best practices in naming files and how I've adopted some of those practices. Hope this gives you some ideas on how you can name and organize your files. If you've learned anything from this video, please give it a like. And if you enjoy contents like this, be sure to subscribe to my channel. Thanks and bye for now.