Not hard

I despair sometimes.

You’d think that people could and would grasp the concept that files are there to provide reference and reminders of decisions taken and discussions had. You would assume that people understood that they should be easy to refer to and to find.

This is all the more important in these days of electronic filing, where we have fewer and fewer paper records (rain forests of the world rejoice!).

I understand that as organisations evolve and bits of divisions get disbanded, or rearranged and such, that local filing systems get a bit jumbled and that often a rearrangement of the system is only undertaken when it collapses and n o-one can find anything anymore. I’m at that stage now: I have had enough and I am reorganising the electronic filing system so I can find stuff easily and quickly. Hopefully, there is some logic to what I am doing that other people can understand.

But I do not follow other peoples’ logic.

We work by subject and by financial year. It seems logical to me therefore to organise the files in this way. So an example pathway might be: P:\Division\grant\2010-11\recipient and then you can hang individual files and subfolders off that, file names prefixed by date (ie a file saved today would be 101119+descriptive name).

There are probably cleverer ways of making files easy to locate and open that I would be equally happy to use.

So why in God’s name do people assign random names to files, save them in esoteric and unrelated areas of any one of a number of drives and then follow the damned things up with entirely unrelated names in completely different places? Why the Hell do they change from financial to calendar years at a whim, duplicate subdirectories (and files) in different formats and then proudly claim the data doesn’t exist?

A baboon could do better. And you could pay it in peanuts.

Oh. Silly me. They are paying in peanuts. Bring in the baboons, then.

Not hard

I despair sometimes.

You’d think that people could and would grasp the concept that files are there to provide reference and reminders of decisions taken and discussions had. You would assume that people understood that they should be easy to refer to and to find.

This is all the more important in these days of electronic filing, where we have fewer and fewer paper records (rain forests of the world rejoice!).

I understand that as organisations evolve and bits of divisions get disbanded, or rearranged and such, that local filing systems get a bit jumbled and that often a rearrangement of the system is only undertaken when it collapses and n o-one can find anything anymore. I’m at that stage now: I have had enough and I am reorganising the electronic filing system so I can find stuff easily and quickly. Hopefully, there is some logic to what I am doing that other people can understand.

But I do not follow other peoples’ logic.

We work by subject and by financial year. It seems logical to me therefore to organise the files in this way. So an example pathway might be: P:\Division\grant\2010-11\recipient and then you can hang individual files and subfolders off that, file names prefixed by date (ie a file saved today would be 101119+descriptive name).

There are probably cleverer ways of making files easy to locate and open that I would be equally happy to use.

So why in God’s name do people assign random names to files, save them in esoteric and unrelated areas of any one of a number of drives and then follow the damned things up with entirely unrelated names in completely different places? Why the Hell do they change from financial to calendar years at a whim, duplicate subdirectories (and files) in different formats and then proudly claim the data doesn’t exist?

A baboon could do better. And you could pay it in peanuts.

Oh. Silly me. They are paying in peanuts. Bring in the baboons, then.