I laughed at my coworker's file naming system for months until I needed to find something

Honestly, I thought our intern was insane when he set up this whole YYYY_MM_DD_ProjectName_ClientInitial system six months ago. I kept just tossing everything into one folder with names like 'final_v3_actuallyfinal.doc' like I always did. Then last Tuesday our manager asked for a specific budget sheet from March 2023 and I spent 45 minutes digging through my mess while the intern pulled it up in 10 seconds flat. He even had a backup checklist that showed who last edited each file and when. Now I'm stuck rebuilding my entire folder structure from scratch and it's way more work than if I'd just done it his way from the start. Has anyone else had to eat crow over a simple system they dismissed?

2 comments

2 Comments

kelly.parker15h ago

omg yes, this is literally me but with my bookmark folders. I used to just save everything to the browser bookmarks bar with no organization and it was fine until I needed to find that one recipe my mom sent me three years ago for a specific type of apple crisp. Spent like an hour scrolling through 500 random bookmarks and gave up. Now I've got this whole nested folder system with tags and I still judge myself for how long I resisted it. It's like the universe punishes us for being lazy about small stuff until it blows up in our faces.

johnb953h agoMost Upvoted

I gotta push back on this a bit. I'm still living in the chaos of 500 random bookmarks and honestly it works fine for me. The time I spend searching for stuff is maybe 10 minutes once a year, which is way less than the hours I'd waste setting up some fancy folder system.