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4 Tips for Time-Saving File Naming Conventions Maha Bali Google docs. Calendar entries. Email subjects. Someone make it stop with the generic names. Like "meeting minutes" for a gdoc. Or "meet Maha" (on my own calendar, invitation sent by someone else who called it that). Or email subject "update on our project". And oh oh. The attachment that reads something like "thesis version 3″. Somebody make it stop. It will take anyone forever to find these documents again when they need them. Jason had previously mentioned naming conventions between professors and students, but this post is for naming things for yourself, and for anything that you share with others, in ways that keep them easy to retrieve and identify, for all parties involved. Here are some tips: Make it meaningful and unique. If it's meeting minutes, could you possibly name it "X department/committee meeting minutes January 10 2018″? Or if it's an email: "XYZ Project update". Or the attachment "Maha Bali thesis version 3″. Or the calendar entry "X meets Y over Z". It's not that hard Think of your audience. If I'm sending a copy of my thesis to myself it's fine. But sending it to my supervisor or examiner who get many such theses, a unique title helps. Not just "Maha Bali thesis" but even "Maha Bali Thesis Critical thinking in context" (for the examiner who doesn't know my name but knows the subject). I was also recently working on a book chapter with a colleague and noticed that while I searched for the Google doc by the topic, she just searched for "book chapter". She's only got one of those. I have several and differentiate them differently. It's useful for the title of a Google doc to show WHAT type of thing it is (book chapter, meeting minutes, brainstorming document) and what it's ABOUT (topic or title). Same for calendar invitations. WHO and WHAT. Don't attach a "project proposal" but rather "Spencer project proposal for lifelong learning conference". Include as much detail as possible in the smallest number of words possible. E.g. Use Jan instead of January or use short date notation 10-1-18. Use abbreviations that are familiar to the people you're communicating with When it makes sense to number a group of things, like a group of documents ordered in a particular way, include the numbering at the beginning or end of the file name. This is really helpful if you are an instructional designer trying to piece together work a teacher submitted to you on Google drive. If you're curious, before getting this onto WordPress, it was a Google doc called "Naming Conventions Prof Hacker" so I'd remember I'm intending to publish it here, not somewhere else. Do you have other tips for good naming conventions for things like emails, Google docs, attachments and calendar entries? Tell us in the comments! ["Save me, I'm drowning in data!" flickr photo by quinn.anya shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license] RSS to Email Formatted