Pick a file name style and stick with it

One of the problems we all face in our digital lives is the question of naming and storing our files. We create possibly thousands of documents in many formats and try to store them in some meaningful fashion.

If you carefully select one system and stick with it, your entire document workflow will improve.

Here are a few things to consider as your paperless life grows.

Consistent names are good

You probably do need a consistent style for your document names. Arbitrary names such as “Homework assignment 1″ work fine when you have a few dozen documents, but as your library grows, the file names become less helpful. Imagine trying to find that document in a deep folder structure with thousands of similar items.

Remember that anything of importance that you have in your personal digital library is likely to be moved around quite a bit in your lifetime. Operating systems change. Software companies go out of business. Having a good “lowest common denominator” in your file names can help protect you as your files are tossed about over the years.

Pick one system and stick with it

Once you have a substantial collection of documents, it becomes quite tedious to go through them on some great name-changing expedition. In addition, changing file names causes indigestion in your backups, and is particularly hard to implement if you keep permanent backups on media such as CDs and DVDs.

Keep the name relatively computer friendly

There was once a time when savvy users would never embed a space character in a filename. Those days are all but gone, and we can happily use spaces to improve the readability of filenames. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to consider other limitations.

Don’t make big long cumbersome names that choke “open file” windows and folder views.

Avoid funny characters, even if the operating system allows them. For example, Mac OS X allows you to use characters such as “/” in names, but when you do so, OS X silently substitutes them, keeping a “display name” and a “real name” for each file.

In the example above you can see that I named a file “bozo/clown.jpg” but the terminal window on the left shows that OS X kindly replaced the Unix-unfriendly “/” with a “:”.

Imagine the challenges you will face when you try sharing this file with a Windows user or searching for duplicates of this file in your backups.

Make the name meaningful

There are loads of content management applications out there, but they pretty much all depend on maintaining their own special repository of keywords, tags, and annotations for your files. Guess what happens if you ever have to change to a new document management application? All of those fancy duds are stripped away, leaving your documents bare, with only their names and their content.

There are many situations where the filename is all you have to go on; quite often, filenames are the only thing you can search for.

In other words, put some meaning in the name. Instead of “Homework assignment #1″ try “EN-101 Writing assignment 1, My Summer Vacation.” I’ll admit, that’s a bit wordy, but you see that it includes the course name, the type of document, and a bit of the title.

Consider putting dates in your filenames. Files get copied all the time, and sometimes the “creation date” doesn’t survive the copy operation. In addition, if you are scanning in a paper document that is dated “March 25, 1992,” you might want to have the file name reflect the original paper document’s date and not an arbitrary file system date.

My own preferred style

This is how I like to name my documents:

yyyymmdd {General Topic} – {Specific Title}.pdf

For example:

20090207 Auto - Registration for Jetta.pdf

When I scan in a document, I try to find the most appropriate date for the creation date; in the example, I might have chosen either the date that NJ DMV wrote on the renewal letter, or the postmark.

I include the eight-digit date in exactly that format because it sorts perfectly. If you have a folder with a hundred files that have been named in this way, you can sort on the file name and they will appear in chronological order.

There are as many different systems for naming files as there are people—find one that works for you and stick with it.

Here’s a short page on the subject from Get-it-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips.