I get it! I'm with you a 100%. I hate working with files too. I can't stand organizing them. Shoot me, if I had to spend a minute more being lost in a chaos of files and folders. I'd rather wish stuff just was always in the right spot so we could do more important things than work with files.

Unfortunately, files won't organize themselves. 

I discovered this uncomfortable truth in the previous company I worked with. I had no choice but to figure out a completely new system on how to deal with files during the 7 years I worked there. It was hell. Let me explain.

First off. I think we can agree that...

The complexity increases as you add more and more files of different types into the same system. 

Allow me to introduce you to the worst case scenario.

I was working with a company that sold chemicals worldwide. Regulations are different for every country, even in the EU. We had to change recipes for some of the markets. To make it even worse, these regulations apply to marketing also. What is legal to claim in one country (i.e Canada) differs from another (i.e US), so even the English versions would differ on the package, and in the marketing material.

This meant we had to different product labels for the 17 products, and this expanded our product range to well over 250 articles.

On top of all this, we offered the products also as private label, which meant we did unique labels for each client. Some clients were resellers, so they had to have the appropriate marketing materials for their products in that language.

This was only the start of the nightmare in the design department.

Imagine all the sales material that had to be done as we did demo designs for each prospect. Add to that all of the other documentation, inventory, processes, licensing, etc etc and you'll have a grasp of what we were dealing with in regards to files.

On top of it all, I worked remotely with a team in Sweden, Italy, South Africa and Australia.

Soon I was working with 30000+ files in six different languages.

Even though we worked with standards, processes and templates, all this had to be organized. There was NO CHOICE. I had to figure it out. There was no one else.

On way too many occasions I had the sales manager in my DM's shouting "SALES STOP! I spent 10 minutes looking for this file and it cost me another sales call I could of made instead! Where is it?". And he was right.

If you waste time searching for a file, it costs money. Real money. 

I had no choice but to solve it. I tried several approaches. I found some ideas from LEAN that worked, but no matter how I did it some files broke the rules.

As the IT-manager I spent months figuring out how to get everything working - which I finally did BUT I quickly learned that it was too complex for the team to understand. They could not care less about the new system. They didn't want to hear, think or learn anything new

What do I mean?!

Look... Files are mind-numbingly boring. Nobody wants to work with files and structure. No one! Certainly not me! That meant that in order for a file structure to work it has to be completely intuitive.

It was impossible to introduce a 'new' system- and I was stuck.

I had to keep it simple or else it would not work.

If it was the least complicated, we would soon have a mess on our hands again. I had to go back to the think tank for another six months trying to solve this conundrum.

The primary focus became: How to I create something that everyone just uses intuitively? It has to be exactly what people are used to but it simply works.

I knew I had the basics there, but something was off... I chipped away all of the complexity one by one, until I only had the essentials left. Now it was simple enough. But, there still was the problem with the anomalies. The files that really did not fit in. The files that broke the rules somehow.

Then it dawned on me. I figured out the final rule that solved the problem with anomalies.

It took me four different versions and five years of development to have something that is simple and that works every time.

We had the final version installed by 2021. We have been using this system and it has been working for us ever since. You could wake me up in the middle of the night and I would be able to pinpoint the location of any of the 30000+ files we had in the system.

The solution is tested. It works.

The rules are just common sense. The magic is in the setting up the folders, which that is a one time installation plus a little tuning. As a user, you instantly know what to do. You know exactly where to store and find a file. It just works.