When was the last time you lost track of a digital something? It’s remarkably easy to accumulate a giant stockpile of digital files, emails, articles, and/or photos and it’s remarkably frustrating to try to find one specific item in that giant stockpile.
Being organized is clearly the solution, but knowing the answer doesn’t seem to be enough. We seem to need to know how to be organized. I propose that there are two keys to success in this quest to find your digital zen. Â The two keys to becoming digitally organized:
- Having a consistent organizational system
- Diligently applying your system as soon as you decide to address an item later
Having a Consistent Organizational System
Any system will likely be one, or a mix of at least two of these methods:
- Search: Keeping all of your items in one big place (inbox, Dropbox, your Downloads folder) and searching on demand.
- Sort: Directing your digital items into smaller ‘buckets’ (Inbox Labels, Folders/subfolders, Evernote Notebooks) to target your efforts in finding them later.
- Deal with it Later: Using your Desktop to temporarily house an item or a service like Nudgemail to remind you later, until you can eventually address it.
- Link: Saving the URL to an item via web clippers or bookmarks, so you can find it again, later.
Whatever method(s) you choose to create your own system, make sure they are easy to implement and that you consciously stick to them.
Diligently Applying Your System, As Soon As You Decide to Address an Item Later
I used to work for a lawyer who insisted that I scan all of his court documents, for each case, and name them in a very precise way, starting with the date. You don’t want to know how many hours I spent standing at that scanner, hunting and pecking out document titles, but the result was that the lawyer always found the files he needed, quickly. The investment in diligence paid off.
Some Specific Tips to Help Your Organizational System Sing:
Have a searchable naming convention.
The lawyer I mentioned, had me name documents exactly like this:
[document date (in this syntax: “1.01.2014”)] [client name] [document type] [short description]
Having all this information in the document titles provided immediate context, and with the dates listed first, he knew exactly what and how to search, whenever he was looking for something.
Write dates the same way.
- 01/01/2014
- 01.01.2014
- 1.1.2014
Each of these will return different search results. Pick one and stay with it, to ensure that you can find your items later.
Keep a list of common keywords.
Tag everything. Keep a list of common keywords and limit yourself to just the words on that list. If you don’t reference a keyword list while you’re tagging, you’re sure to end up with an epic mess of tags, many of which will be permutations of each other, with only one item associated. For example:
- follow-up
- follow up
- follow-ups
- f/u
Set calendar reminders to clean up after your digital self.
Set a weekly meeting for yourself to go through your items. Be ruthless. You’ll likely toss out half of what you saved and happily discover a few gems.
At the end of the day, it’s your digital sanity that you’re preserving. Once you can get in the habit of developing your own content sorting system, the stress of creating new content and revisiting old content will be greatly diminished. Most importantly, digital organization will save you from a ton of #SalesFails!
I’ve listed just a few organizational tips here; do you have any others that have worked well for you? If so, leave them in the comments so we can all benefit!
Luke Martin is the Manager of Services at Mediafly and is also a published author and cartoonist. He is the creator of our SalesFails comic. For more of his work, visit www.lukemart.in
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