Here's our tip for sorting out your digital files so you can find what you're looking for.
Over the past decade, there has been a major appetite for organisation. Marie Kondo rose to prominence in 2014. Her KonMari Method advocates tidying by category, only keeping items that spark joy and discarding the items that do not, thanking them for their service. Her process has empowered the most sentimental among us to part with possessions and successfully declutter. Clea and Joanna’s Get Organised with The Home Edit on Netflix has proven extremely popular. Their method of editing, categorising, containing and maintaining items in beautiful, labelled containers in aesthetically pleasing rainbow displays, has garnered them a huge list of celebrity clients, 6.5M followers on instagram and for their highly sought out storage solutions to fly off the shelves. We saw a real surge in home organisation during the pandemic. After speaking with professional organisers and mental health experts, Isabel Calkin explores why that was in her blog. She explains that ‘There’s a deep connection between space and mental health.’ ‘Organising the spaces you use every single day allows you to feel in-control’ and it sets you ‘up for success every time.’
This is all about our physical environment. What about our digital environment? We are becoming more and more dependent on our digital devices and so the same principles apply. Here is our little tip to organise your digital files in a way that sets you up for success.
People often ask us why we put dates in the format 2022-04-31. They often think we're using an American date format. It is actually an international format designed to ensure it can be read by Americans and Brits alike. Putting the four-digit year before a month prevents the classic 04/05/15 confusion. What date is that if you just read it somewhere random on the internet? Moreover, the main reason we use this format is that if you use it at the beginning of a file name, your files will automatically be sorted in date order. Why don’t you just use the sort in date order function we hear you ask? Take bookkeeping for example, unless you collate and record receipts at time of purchase, so that the date of file created is the same as that on the receipt it isn’t going to work.