Your File Names Are Costing You Time

I once spent twenty minutes looking for a quote I had written for a client.

I knew it existed. I had written it. I could picture the conversation. But somewhere between saving it and needing it again, it had disappeared into a folder called something like Misc 2022 or Documents New or possibly just Untitled.

Twenty minutes is a long time when you are trying to look professional on a phone call and have to say you'll call them back in a minute.

If you run a creative business - especially one where every commission is different - your files are the paper trail of your entire working life. Quotes, reference photos, client briefs, invoices, supplier receipts, design files, finished work. Every job generates documents.

And if those documents are not named and stored in a way that makes them findable, you are not really filing them. You are losing them slowly.

This is not particularly exciting business administration. But it is one of those small things that can make an enormous difference to how easy your business is to run.

Why file names matter more than you realise

Most people name files the way they name things when they are in a hurry. Whatever comes to mind. Whatever the software suggests. Document1.docx. Scan0047.pdf. IMG_3821.jpg.

These names make perfect sense to the device that created them. They make considerably less sense to you three weeks later when you are trying to find them.

The problem compounds quickly in a commission business. You might have dozens of active jobs, each generating several files - a brief, reference images, a quote, a design file, perhaps proofs or revisions, and photographs of the finished work.

If none of those files has a meaningful name, you have created a filing system that only works when you already know where everything is.

Which is not really a filing system at all.

The separator question

There is a surprising amount written about whether file names should contain spaces, hyphens or underscores.

For ordinary files that live on your own computer or in cloud storage, the most important thing is not choosing the one technically perfect separator. It is choosing a convention that is readable and using it consistently.

Spaces are much less problematic than they once were. Hyphens are useful, particularly for files that may eventually be used online. Underscores work too.

What matters to me is being able to glance at a long list of files and immediately understand what each one is.

I tend to use hyphens to separate words within a description and double hyphens to separate the main pieces of information.

It isn't a universal rule.

It's simply my rule.

And having a rule means I don't have to invent a file name every time I save something.

A naming convention that actually works

A naming convention is simply a consistent pattern for naming things.

For a commission business, you might use:

[job reference] -- [client name] -- [what it is] -- [date or version]

In practice:

j001 -- smith -- quote -- 2024-03-15.pdf

j001 -- smith -- reference-photo -- 01.jpg

j001 -- smith -- finished -- 01.jpg

j002 -- jones -- brief -- 2024-03-18.pdf

Everything for job 001 starts with j001. Search for that reference and the related files are immediately identifiable.

The client's name gives you another way to recognise or search for it.

And "quote", "reference-photo" or "finished" tells you what you are looking at without opening the file.

You don't have to use my convention. In fact, yours should reflect the information that is most useful in your own business.

The important thing is deciding on one.

Why I use dates backwards

There is one naming habit I would recommend fairly universally.

When a date forms part of a file or folder name, I use:

YYYY-MM-DD

So 15 March 2024 becomes:

2024-03-15

This feels slightly unnatural to British eyes at first, but there is a good reason for it.

Computers generally sort file names alphabetically, character by character from left to right. If you start the date with the day, files from different months and years don't naturally fall into chronological order.

Put the year first, then the month, then the day, and they do:

2023-11-03

2024-03-15

2024-06-22

It is simply moving from the largest unit to the smallest.

This doesn't mean you need to start writing dates this way everywhere. Your invoices, correspondence and spreadsheet displays can still say 15/03/2024.

This is just a useful convention for file and folder names when you want the computer to put them into chronological order for you.

Folder structure matters too

File names get you part of the way there. Where you put the files matters too.

I think the useful principle here is that your folder structure should reflect the way you actually think about your work rather than becoming an elaborate filing hierarchy that makes perfect sense when you build it and requires a map six months later.

For a commission business, that might mean keeping active jobs together and easy to reach, then moving completed jobs into an archive when they are finished.

Within each job folder, the structure can be very simple.

The important question is not whether your filing system would impress an administrator.

It is whether you can find the information you need while a client is waiting on the phone.

Using cloud storage

I use Google Drive because I work across different devices and I want my files to be available wherever I am.

Other cloud storage systems can do the same job. The particular platform matters less than having one reliable place where your business files live.

Search has also become much better than it used to be. Meaningful file names give you one way to find something, while the contents of many document types can also be searchable.

But I don't think good search is an excuse for meaningless file names.

Search is much more useful when the results themselves tell you what they are.

Don't turn this into a three-week filing project

This is the point at which a sensible little improvement can become an enormous job.

You decide your filing is a mess.

Then you look at several years of files and think you need to rename and reorganise all of them before the new system can begin.

You don't.

Start with the next job.

Decide how new job folders will be named. Decide how you'll name the files you create most often. Write the convention down somewhere if you need to.

Then use it.

If you open an old job and it makes sense to tidy the files while you're there, fine. But you don't need to reorganise your entire business history before you can make tomorrow's files easier to find.

A useful system can start now and gradually become more useful simply because you keep using it.

What I eventually automated

Once I had worked out how I wanted my own commission files organised, I stopped doing some of this manually.

In the system I've built for my engraving business, a new commission can create its own job folder using the information I've already entered. The structure and naming don't depend on me remembering my own rules every time.

That automation is useful.

But the important bit happened before I automated anything.

I had to decide what the rules were.

What information mattered.

How I would naturally look for something later.

What needed to be in the file name and what didn't.

What should happen to a job when it was finished.

That's something I've noticed repeatedly while building systems for my own business: automation doesn't remove the need to make good decisions about how something should work.

It just means you don't have to keep making the same decision over and over again.

And that, for me, is the real value of a good filing system.

Not beautifully organised folders.

Being able to find the quote while the client is still on the phone.

Rosie