3 Effortless Tips To Help You Organize And Better Manage Your Google Drive

Google Drive is an essential part of Google’s productivity suite & a tool loved by one & all. It doesn’t matter if it’s for personal or professional usage; Google Drive allows users to create, edit, store and share documents with others in real-time, monitor changes made to folders and files, create templates for documents, share huge files, and much more. Google Drive also offers the flexibility to work with various formats and file types that are not Google-compatible, like Microsoft Office files, PDFs, JPGs, and many other formats. With all these options available, you can end up with thousands of files stored in your drive in no time, meaning that you’re going to struggle with maintaining everything organized.

But there’s a Bright Side! Google Drive comes with various helpful features that could make a huge difference in organizing your drive’s contents. You can use everything from color-coding your folders to creating separate workspaces based upon what you are most likely to use. If your Google Drive is a mess, these guidelines will aid you in creating a system to make Google Drive much more organized and easy to navigate.

1. Sorting – Plan and create a folder structure you like

The most effective way to start is to establish a uniform folder structure. One way to do that is to create one folder for each type of document, and then, you can create subfolders for each aspect of that category. An “uncategorized” folder can be your place to store all documents that do not fit into the other folders. Check this “uncategorized” folder regularly and organize its contents into appropriate folders (probably with labels wherever possible)

Within each subfolder, it is recommended to create further organized folders by week to keep track of the date of creation of each document. This makes sure that no folder is overloaded and becomes difficult to navigate through.

2. Add Colours – Let’s spice up the look of your Google Drive

Google Drive has an amazing feature that lets you colour-code your folders. This can be done to make searching through your drive quicker & easier.

In the below example, we have made every folder within our drive, each a different shade and each subfolder a different shade of the same hue. The weekly folders that are dated within each subfolder share the same colour as the subfolder it’s located within. In this way, if viewing a folder titled “April 6-12,” you can immediately identify the types of documents inside it by looking at its colour.

3. Set up a standard for naming conventions

Date of creation is a strangely absent field on Google Drive, and instead, you can look at the date a document was last modified. Searching for documents by their date of creation can be helpful and more intuitive. This is something to consider when deciding on your name convention.

We believe it is best to name each document using the following format: “[DateCreated] DocumentName” and let the structure of the folder and colour code complete the rest. For example, a college loan payment receipt created on April 19th is titled “[4.19] Student Loan Receipt.” It will be easy to locate when you search based on the file’s date, name, or title.

4. Bonus – Tip for managing shared files

It could be difficult to find if a file has been shared with you since it’s not automatically added into the “My Drive” folder. Make sure you move the file into the correct folder within “My Drive.” If the file does not conform to your naming conventions, make an additional folder that conforms to your naming rules and then add the shared file in the folder.

To add a file to “My Drive,” select the item within the Shared with Me folder. Click on the three vertical dots on the right-hand left side of the top bar, and then select “Add to My Drive” from the dropdown menu.

Click Here to download this blog as an infographic.