Naming files and subfolders

Sort is our friend

When producing our pre-made systems, we realised something really important. If you lean heavily on 'sort', it solves so many problems.

It brings order to large amounts of information, and it also looks nice, neat, and consistent.

Example

In the Life Admin System, the ID 15.41 All short trips contains all of your short trips. The kind of things that you just book and go, so you don't have much information to store.

You can fit a lifetime of short trips in one ID if you create a new subfolder for each trip, and start it with the 'year-month-day':

Figure 62.34A. Neatly-sorted subfolders starting with year-month-day.

Now every trip sorts by date. And that's all you really need to do.

This works for so many things. 13.31 Purchase receipts is a nice one. You can fit a lifetime of receipts in one ID if they all start with year-month-day, then what it is and where you bought it.

Sorting by year-month-day

ISO 8601 is the only date format you should ever use: yyyy-mm-dd.

Figure 62.34B. Sorting by year-month-day.

Shortening this format also works if you don't need the day.

Figure 62.34C. Sorting by year-month.
Figure 62.34D. Sorting by year.

Any other date format won't sort by date

For example, don't use day-month-year! You've probably seen this pattern before. It's responsible for a lot of the chaos at work.

Figure 62.34E. Sorting by day-month-year brings chaos.

Sorting by version

Version numbers should be consistent and help you sort the files. Naturally you want the older files together at the top and the newer files at the bottom.

I routinely see this done poorly, and it's such an easy thing to get right. Something as simple as this is all you need.

Figure 62.34F. Putting the version number at the start.

Or, if you prefer.

Figure 62.34G. Putting the version number at the end.

Be ruthlessly consistent

All of this neat sorting is easily ruined by being inconsistent. So whatever filename format you decide on, stick with it. Ruthlessly.1

And remember, as soon as you get lazy the sort breaks. A common trap is inconsistently using spaces and symbols.

Figure 62.34H. Unsorted, messy, inconsistently-named files.

This may seem like a small thing, but it can make a big difference. Plus it just looks nicer when everything lines up. :-)

Figure 62.34I. Sorted, neat, consistently-named files.

Should I add the ID to the filename?

It depends. There's two main scenarios where we think it can be handy.

  1. If you're sending files by email. The ID travels with the file and everyone knows exactly what they're looking at.

  2. In your 'recently opened' list of files. The ID can help you choose what you want more quickly.

But broadly, if you find it useful, go ahead. It never hurts, and the little bit of extra typing is usually worth the effort.

Note that if you're a Windows user, you'll be familiar with filename length restrictions. So adding the ID to your filenames may be:

  • Quite useful, helping you cut back on characters,
  • Or not, if you need to include other mandatory details.

Footnotes

  1. We used to recommend separating the date/version from the title with 'space dash space'. We tend not to do that now. But if you prefer it, it's easy to type (no need for the Shift key) and it does look neat. Just be consistent! ā†©