I just completed an email to a couple of business colleagues.

What's your handle?

I pored over the text, ensuring I had made my points clearly. I adjusted the tone to have just the right amount of friendly (not too friendly, but not cold business jerk, either).

I edited a lot of my frilly words out in favor of brevity. I double checked that I had included the attachment. After deciding that it all looked pretty good, staring into the glow of my monitor, I nodded to myself, and clicked “Send”.

And then…

…My email client wouldn’t send it, because it didn’t have a subject line.

Maybe you’ve experienced the same thing when you save  a document — your computer all of a sudden insists that you give your document a name (often at a time when you couldn’t possibly really care what the hell it’s called, because you’re either busy working on it, or it’s finished! )

When exactly, did we have to start putting titles on things? A phone call doesn’t have a title… “Hi Mom, the subject line for my call today is ‘Dinner Tonight at Kate’s'”. Letters (at least, letters worth reading) don’t generally  have a subject line that explains what they are about.

This modern obsession with titles and subject lines have once again been foisted onto us by our machines. When we save something, our computer needs a canonical, unique name to delineate this document from all the other bits of stuff on our hard disk. And naming is often not a discipline that we pay much mind to. Looking in my Default “My Documents” Directory, I can see at least five documents that I have no idea what they are, because they have such generic names as “Screenshots.doc” and “Technical Criteria.xlsx”. I wonder what they are for?

Two naming rules to reduce project friction

Our skill at naming and titling our documents becomes an important asset in our ability to Keep It Together. In fact, consistent naming is one of the lowest effort, highest reward things you can do on your PC to improve productivity. Here’s a couple of  tips to help you out:

1. Give project folders consistent names

Consider the following folders:

Chances are, these two folders actually contain stuff from the same project. Let’s add an email folder in there, as well:

Okay, this is just getting silly. One thing  you don’t want to have to do is to waste time figuring  out which is which when it comes time to find or file some information. Even worse, you could end up creating another folder! You want to choose correctly, instantly, without hesitation. So, at the beginning of the project, pick a single place to store project data,  pick a single name for the project, and stick with it. Everywhere!

If you have a project folder in your email inbox, make sure that it has the exact same name as the folder you created on your local disk. Exactly the same, including matching the case.

The. Same. Exact. Name.

By only ever using a single name to refer to the project, you’re training your brain to recognize it before you do.

One last thing on this point. Consider these two folders:

If there’s one thing a project attracts, it’s acronyms. Again, choose which form you will use at the start, and don’t change it, ever.

2. Include the project name in the Document title or Subject line

Here’s my organized project folder. Can you spot the deliberate mistake?

That’s right! While it looks organized, you should really avoid naming your documents like this. The information classification is perfect when the document is in its home folder. But once you move that document out of its folder, it loses context.

And you will move it. You will mail it out to somebody, or take it with you on a USB drive, or back it up to a different computer. And at some point, you’ll find yourself looking over your Documents or Downloads directory, saying to yourself, “I wonder what that is for?”

A much better filename for this document would be “Project Exodus – Screenshots.docx” – or if you’re really keen, “Project Exodus – Features – Screenshots.docx”. Either one ensures that the context travels with the document.

The same goes for an email subject line:

By always including the project title in any email you send out, you are reducing the amount of time you have to spend processing information that arrives in your inbox. And the great thing about subject lines, is that very few people edit them. They just hit “reply” — and your inbox fills up with easy to recognize, clearly labeled, project content.

It may all sound a bit obvious, but sticking to these two simple naming  rules will mean that your files and emails will take on a more instantly recognizable format, and that your lizard-brain will start to recognize these things before you do. This results in less thinking, and easier identification of your project documents, no matter where they end up.

Related posts

1. What I learned when I stopped using email folders
2. How to name your tasks, meetings, and contacts
3. Infovark Templates: Local Files
4. Locating Stuff: Folders vs. Search
5. Expanding your project context