What you don’t want 

Harrison picks up another page and sighs. It’s his third afternoon in a row of looking for inconsistencies between the digital and paper records. He must have gotten through 3,000 pages by now. Only 21,000 more to go. 

Harrison Pow-Jones joined as the Administrator in the Governance team a few months earlier. He was tasked with creating archives of all the notes and minutes from certain senior meetings over the last 5 years. Due to the pandemic and everyone working from home, the task of keeping a thorough record had fallen to the wayside, where it became larger and ever more intimidating. 

All such documents – except for bound Council and Senate minutes – are now to be made digital, but that didn’t ease Harrison’s pain of having to organise all the records. Many were not stored in the right location, contained multiple documents for each meeting and, most importantly, were not consistently named. 

He recalls being asked to find out when the formation of a board was approved and had to trawl through Paper 255, Paper 255 (a), Paper 255 (b), Paper 256… 

He tells me: “it’s far more manageable to deal with things consistently as they come in – leaving it all to be sorted in one go just makes the task significantly more difficult”. 

With this in mind, he began to create some guidance. 

How to name your files 

There is no single correct way to name your files but there are many incorrect ways. The chief sin amongst them is not to be consistent. You don’t want to think you’ve lost an important document before realising your colleague has simply named it differently. 

The other two main considerations are whether the file is unique and whether the reader can tell what the document is about with just a glance. Regardless of how well the folders are organised, nobody wants to search through every one of your “Meeting Notes”, your “DRAFTnotes(3)” or your five separate documents for each lecture.  

As well as good naming, the order of the files that appear in your folder will make a significant difference. Adding dates to your file names is great but the dates should be formatted by year, month and then date (YYYYMMDD; e.g., 20260521) to avoid the files becoming jumbled. For this same reason, have all numbers contain at least two digits (e.g., 01, 02). 

The system Harrison and the Governance team came up with was: 

1. Start with an initial, so you knew the type of document (e.g., C for a council meeting, M for a nondescript meeting, B for a blog). 
2. Follow this by the year and then a chronologically increasing number within this folder (e.g., 2526 (to show the 2025 to 2026 academic year) – 02). 
3. Add a short name to explain what the document is. Make sure to remove any filler words like “the”, “a” and “and”. If this is an appendix or a draft, include this info here. 
4. If you are renaming someone else's document, make sure they can find it by including any previous information sent to you. 

Combining these together and separating them out with hyphens, you form, for example: 
C2526 – 02 – AI & copyright law – Appendix A – Shelved project

Too long, didn’t read 

• Files must be named consistently. 

• File names must be unique. 

• File names must be understood with a glance. If the file name is too long, it will get cut off and be harder to understand. Consider shortening your file names with these tips: 
  • Remove filler words (e.g., “the”/“and”).
  • Remove spaces and use capital letters for new words (e.g., DonkeysCanBeScary). 
• Do not have multiple versions of the same document. Delete old drafts. 

• Where possible, combine documents for the same meeting/event. 

• Be aware of how the computer will order the files within your folder.
  • If they all start with Draft or Final, they will be clumped together.
  • If you are using numbers, make sure they are at least two digits (e.g., 01).
  • If you are using full dates, format it as YYYYMMDD or YYMMDD (e.g., 260521). 

• Consider using an initial to categorise the document (e.g., M for meeting or R for report). 

• Certain special characters will be rejected or can make your files go haywire when transferring them to other operating systems. Avoid: * . : \ / < > | % " ? [ ] ; = # + £ $ , !