What‘s The Best Way To Organise Documents?

How do you save and store your digital files? Things are changing in this area and it’s what this week’s question is all about.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Sign Up For My Free weekly newsletter Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook More about the Time Sector System The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl’s YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Episode 199 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 199 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. If I asked you to find a Keynote or PowerPower point file you created three years ago, how long would it take you to find it? How about a file you created six months ago?  This is a problem many people are discovering. They cannot remember where (or if) a file is stored.  Several years ago, we would create a folder structure on our computers loosely based around work and home. Our music and video files would be stored together and were accessible via our computer’s media players. But those Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, these were and still are difficult to categorise.  If you were organised, you likely had these saved in sub-folders related to either the project or client, etc.  Whichever way you organised your files, it was time-consuming and once your computer’s hard drive filled up it took at least a day to begin transferring files over to an external hard drive.  Oh, I remember those days well. A lot of fun, but very time-consuming.  This week’s question is all about what to do now to store and keep your files. I can’t wait to get started. So, that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.  This week’s question comes from Dermott. Dermot asks, Hi Carl, do you have any advice on managing files and documents on your computer?  Hi Dermott, thank you for your question.  Now, many of you may have noticed that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are pushing you to keep all your files and documents in the cloud and there’s a very good reason for this.  Google began this by not developing separate computer apps for their Docs, Sheets, and slides. It’s also the reason why we don’t have a stand-alone Gmail app on computers. This is quite different from your phone or tablet where there are dedicated apps.  These companies want you to store your documents in the cloud for a number of reasons. First and foremost is because we have multiple devices now—your phone, tablet, and computer, and if you want access to all your files on all your devices it makes sense to have them located in a central place where you will have access to the latest versions anytime anywhere.  The second reason for this was caused by us. Yes, us. Why? Because the vast majority of us never backed up our files and if your computer died or was lost or stolen, you lost everything. There was no way to retrieve these files. I’m sure those of you who have been using computers for the last fifteen to twenty years will have experienced this at some point or another. Not a great experience.  Now, what you will have noticed is if you are using a Word or an Apple Pages document, the default location for saving is either OneDrive or iCloud. This is because Microsoft and Apple believe they have a better way to manage your documents than you do. And to a large extent, it is true.  If you create a Word document and find yourself rushing off to a meeting, autosave kicks in, and your file is automatically saved to OneDrive’s Word folder. What you will find is if you’re using a Surface Tablet in the meeting, all you need do is open up Word, and there it is. The file you were working on is n