While digital filing can sound a little bit boring, it is incredibly impactful on the productivity in your business.
When talking to my clients about the things that cause friction and resistance in their business, their digital filing system is usually really close to the top of the list. It can be so frustrating when you can’t find what you’re looking for!
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Why Digital Storage is Important
If you have a task that you’ve allotted 10 minutes to do, and you can’t find the document that you need to complete it, it can really easily turn into a 20 minute or 30 minute task. And even worse than all of that wasted time looking for the document is if you never actually find it at all – and you have to start over from scratch.
If you waste 10 minutes per day, Monday to Friday, looking for documents, that’s 2600 minutes a year, or the equivalent of a 40 hour workweek – just looking for files that you couldn’t find!
Not only is this a huge waste of time, but it completely kills your momentum in the middle of the day and it can really stall your productivity.
For most online businesses, cloud-based storage is going to be the way to go. It’s easy to access from anywhere, you never have to remember to bring specific files with you, and it makes it really easy for you to be able to bring team members on board and have them be able to share the files as well.
The other bonuses are that it’s relatively inexpensive, it’s very accessible, and it’s something that a lot of different businesses use, so if you’re sharing files with other people on your team or with clients, they’re going to be quite familiar with how this type of storage works.
Choose Your Google Drive Space Wisely
I would encourage you to choose very wisely about where your drive space is located.
Since it is linked to a particular email, you want to make sure that you’re choosing an email address that is going to make sense for your business long term.
Instead of picking a random email address, choose one that’s domain-based so that you are able to work with that for a long period of time. If you end up having to move your data from one drive space to another, it can be a giant headache and a lot of work.
So plan carefully!
Be Strategic with Your Filing Hierarchy
As you’re setting things up, I would encourage you to sit down and to think carefully through the type of business that you’re running, and how that relates to the type of hierarchy you should set up for your files.
I personally like a top-level hierarchy of no more than five to eight folders, but it really is based on the type of business that you’re running. The folders should be split up into the main components of your business.
It’s also a really good idea to think ahead to how the files will be used. For example, you may want an operations or administration folder that houses your HR information and legal documents, payroll and things like that, that you wouldn’t necessarily want all of your team to have access to.
You want to make sure that you’re setting your files up in a way where you can share parts of these folders or share parts of your drive with other members on your team without having to expose confidential information that you want to just keep to yourself.
Be Consistent with Your File Names
Another important consideration is the naming conventions that you use. If you decide to use Google Drive for your drive space, it has amazing search capability (as Google does everywhere), but you really want to be able to help it along.
If you’re just starting out and you’re the only one on your team, it can be easy to fall into the habit of naming documents things like “client notes”.
Unfortunately, as you grow your team, it becomes more and more difficult for them to be able to figure out what that file name actually means.
The sooner you can get into a pattern of choosing good names to be able to name your file, the easier it will be as you grow your team along the way!
I would really encourage you to include dates whenever possible in a year, month, date format – so that they’re easy to find – as well as being very clear on what it is that’s actually in that particular document.
The naming conventions that you choose may differ slightly depending on the type of file that’s actually being filed.
For example, if you are a service-based business and one of your main hierarchy levels is “Clients”, your subfolders could be named for each one of your clients, and then all of the appropriate files and folders stored can be filed under that subfolder.
But if you’re filing content that is date-based – for example, YouTube videos that are launched on a particular date – it oftentimes would make more sense to use the date first in the naming convention and then the name of the video.
You’ll have to do a little bit of experimentation to find the system that works best for you and your team!
The most important thing here is consistency and sticking to the particular options that you have decided to use.
Move to a Digital Note Format
One of the biggest struggles that I see a lot of entrepreneurs face is actually moving towards using completely digital files, and a big area that I see this in is with notes.
Often when we’re bootstrapping and building our businesses from the ground up, we get used to just holding all of the information in our head. But as the business grows and scales and we have more responsibilities, we will eventually get to a point where we can’t hold all that information in our head anymore and we need people to come in to be able to assist us.
If you can get into the habit early of moving all of your notes into a digital form and filing them appropriately in your filing system, it will pay off huge dividends as you move forward and you build your team.
Actually File Your Documents
The last consideration when building your filing system, and maybe the most important, is actually filing your documents.
I know that sounds a little bit funny, but this is an area that a lot of people struggle with – myself included. It’s hard to be motivated to file everything every single time!
One of the ways that I get around this is to use a folder in my highest level of hierarchy that’s called “To be filed”, so that when documents are created, and if you don’t have time to file them immediately, they can be put into the “to be filed” folder.
They’re easily accessible there when I have time to set aside at the end of a week or the end of the month, depending on how many documents I’m creating, and go through and I can be able to file all of my filing at once.
It’s kind of like your email inbox. If you keep up with it on a regular basis, it doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming. But if you let it get out of control, it can start to become pretty scary.
One of the other benefits of using a “to be filed” folder is that is something that you could actually hand off to a team member to do for you as well.
And this is where having really strong naming conventions comes into play again, as then your assistant, or somebody else on your team, can come in and look at your files and know exactly where they need to be filed because you’ve made it abundantly clear what is actually contained within that document and which folder it belongs in.
I hope that these tips help you to create a more sustainable system for your team so you can make your business more profitable, more efficient, and a lot less frustrating!
