An almost classic situation that will certainly sound familiar to you: Shortly before the deadline, the tax return is quickly put together and some invoice documents are still missing. Despite a lengthy search, the documents can’t be found and you’re completely frustrated because the deadline is approaching and the declaration is still incomplete. By the skin of your teeth, you then submit the declaration, incomplete but nonetheless. However, you sincerely hope that the tax office will not ask for the missing copy of the invoice, because otherwise you might have to pay a tax bill instead of a refund. If you had just collected your invoice copies in one place and not taken care of your filing at the last minute, as usual, you would then blame yourself …..
The issue of document filing is a difficult one for me as well. It involves a lot of complexity and requires constant perseverance on my part. Nevertheless, there are principles that have helped me a lot to file my most important documents in a structured and digital way without losing track of them.
Use the 7 folders principle for each “filing container”
You will quickly lose track if you don’t have a basic idea where your documents are located. It is therefore important to have at least one category in mind to which your document could be assigned. However, categorization is a very individual thing and at least for me it is often the case that I frequently change categories by which I structure my digital files. But even more important, that the category is a 100% fit, is that your category concept remains relatively constant. If you keep changing it, you will quickly lose track of where you have stored what, not to mention the “migration effort” involved in a re-categorization. The search for the perfect classification was certainly my biggest mistake on the way to a well sorted and useful digital filing system, because there is no perfect classification in the end! So say goodbye to perfection and come up with a rough concept of what categories you want your private documents or files to have.
However, it is important that you do not create an infinite number of categories and folders in which to place your documents. A second essential principle is that you must be able to tell at once what is located within a storage location. And this is where the “7 Folder Principle” will help you! The “7 Folder Principle” basically means that you should not create more than seven folders (= categories) in a single filing level. Our brain has only a limited capacity to process different categories. Between five to seven different categories at once is a good value, which can be processed by your brain at a glance. Of course you can experiment and work with more or less folders per level. For me it’s six folders, which I use to structure my personal digital filing system:
- “01. Orga” : Anything that is used less frequently, but still needs to be on hand if necessary (graduation documents, birth certificate, passport copy, etc.)
- “02. in progress” : All contracts that are currently running and current projects
- “03. temp” : Everything I only need temporary access to, such as tickets and what can be safely deleted afterwards …
- “04. inspiration”: Search results for online research that don’t have a place in the “current projects” section yet and photos
- “05. tools”: mainly templates and software
- “06. relocate”: my “junk drawer”
As you can see, these categories might not make sense for your personal filing system, so please think about your own categories and try them out for some time. It’s also very important that you define something like a “junk drawer”, where you can store things that don’t fit into other categories, but that you want to keep. You should also empty this folder from time to time (every half year for me, but depending on how much space you want to reserve for it) and archive the documents contained in it locally. If you no longer need them after 2-3 years, you can delete your local archive safely. Just make a copy of your “Junkdrawer” locally with date and set a date for in 3 years to delete the content. If you have accessed the archive within the 3 years and fished out a document there, change the date to the day of access and play the game from the beginning.
The nice thing about the digital categories is that you can nest them in depth, which is not so simple in the analog world (try to add subcategories to your paper folders… I lose track of everything after the second sublevel at the latest!) Digitally this works perfectly and so you can define new categories on each sublevel, preferably not more than five to seven, but make sure that it makes sense, for example if you, like me, have stored all your past rental agreements in the archive folder, then you can confidently create a folder for each past apartment and do not have to frantically invent categories and rethink with each move.
You won’t know all the categories of your subfolders by heart using the “7 folder principle”, but you will always have a rough idea where exactly which document is located. Once a category is clear, you will only have to work your way along the file path to get to your documents. Now you have an overview of all your documents, but how do you keep them safe?
Cloud or local document storage, what’s better?
In principle, I recommend both! Store your documents once locally and once in the cloud, so that you always have a backup of your documents. Of course, you can also store all your documents locally via NAS or external storage, but you need a bit more discipline, because you have to make sure that your directory is backed up regularly. And even with automatic backups, you still need to monitor a bit more strictly that there is actually a backup of your data and that your NAS has not lost the connection or something similar… Likewise, if you store everything locally, you have to consider that in case of a fire or other disaster, all your documents would be completely gone, unless you have organized a backup in another place (e.g. NAS set up at your parents’ place or hard drive at close friends’ place or hard drive deposited in the bank safe deposit box). Although unlikely, the possibility of a disaster cannot be ruled out, and to be honest, I often need many documents on the road, even if I don’t have my laptop with me… That’s why I like to work with cloud storage, both via well-known cloud storage providers, where you may have to buy additional storage space, or you could directly go to a hosting provider and buy more and more storage space as needed, and thus be a bit more flexible. However you go about it, there is one problem with cloud storage: your data is accessible in the cloud by anyone with your access data to your cloud account! Therefore, secure handling of your access data as well as the documents you upload is very important:
- Use a strong password and save it in a password manager or know it by heart
- Use at least a second authentication factor for your cloud account, better a third one
- Encrypt the documents you upload!
As for encryption: You can learn about PGP encryption and encrypt everything you upload properly, but you absolutely must not lose your encryption keys, otherwise you won’t be able to get to your documents in an emergency… You can also password-protect your documents using the native tools (again, please use strong passwords!). PDF documents for example can be password protected. And everything you can’t secure with the format’s own backup tools, you put into a .zip archive, which you can password protect in turn. Of course you always have to unzip your files and delete the old zip archive to be able to change data in your folders. But I think this is a well tolerable pain for the additional security you get. Sensitive documents, though, you’re better off encrypting using PGP and keeping your keys safe. More on that to come in another blog post.
How many file systems do you need?
Please try to use only one category set for your private filing system. I often find myself creating different categories depending on the cloud service I use and then quickly lose track of everything… If you absolutely want to use different cloud providers, then do so if you are working on separate projects or with shared folders that need to be accessed by multiple users. Here also the “7 folder principle” helps to keep a better overview, but this does not have to be as stringent as with the private filing system, as many categories are project-specific and arise out of the project. Concentrate on your private documents first, before we turn to the difficult topic of collaboration and project management. Test your filing system for at least two months and try to classify everything stored digitally into the categories you defined at the beginning. If the defined categories still cause problems, you can adjust them a bit after the initial two months. I hope that after at least three iterations you will have found your desired categories and will be able to archive documents consistently over several years and, more importantly, find them again after a relatively short period of time!