How to Build a Searchable Archive for Your Personal and Work Documents
Albert Einstein once said, “Organised people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” And I think he makes a very good point.
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Script | 401
Hello, and welcome to episode 401 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Last week’s episode on what to keep in your notes sparked a lot of follow-up questions around the concept of how to organise notes and digital files.
In many ways, this has been one of the disadvantages of the digital explosion. Back in the day, important documents were kept inside filing cabinets and were organised alphabetically. Photos were mostly kept in photo books, which were then thrown into boxes and hidden under beds or in the attic.
The best ones were put in frames and displayed on tables and mantelpieces—something we rarely do today.
And notebooks, if kept, were put at the bottom of bookshelves or in boxes.
The limiting factor was physical space. This meant we regularly curated our files and threw out expired documents.
The trouble today is that digital documents don’t take up visible physical space, so as long as you have enough digital storage either on your computer’s hard drive or in the cloud, you can keep thousands of documents there without the need to curate and keep them updated.
Eventually, it becomes practically impossible to know what we have, where it is, or even how to start finding it if we do know what we want to find.
So, before I continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia asks, “ Hi Carl, I listened to your recent podcast episode on what to keep in your notes, and it got me thinking. How would someone go about organising years of digital stuff that has accumulated all over the place?
Hi Julia, thank you for your question.
A couple of years ago, I became fascinated with how the National Archives in Kew, London, handles archiving millions of government documents each year.
Compared to us individuals, this would be extreme, but they have hundreds of years of experience in this matter, and my thinking was that if anyone knew how to manage documents, they would know.
What surprised me was that they maintained a relatively simple system. That system was based on years and the department from which the documents originated.
So, for example, anything that came from the Prime Minister’s office last year would be bundled together under 2025. It would then be given the prefix PREM.
(They do use a code for the years to help with cataloguing, as the National Archives will be keeping documents from different centuries)
Upon further investigation, the reason they do it this way is that older documents are most likely searched for by year.
Let’s say I was writing a book on British disasters in the 20th century, and I wanted to learn more about the Aberfan Disaster, where a coal slag heap collapsed, crushing the village of Aberfan in Wales.
All I would need to know would be the year, and a simple Google search would give me that. From there, I could search the National Archives for HOME 1966. That search would indicate the Home Office files for 1966. (The year the disaster happened)
I would also know that the disaster happened in October, so I could refine my search to October dates.
If we were to use a system similar to the one the National Archives uses to organise its documents, we would create parent folders by year.
You can then go through your documents wherever they are and, using your computer’s ability to detect when a document was created, have it show your list of files by when they were created. That way, all you need to do is select all files from a given year and move them into their appropriate year folder.
Now, when I do this, I notice that I have files going back to 2015.
The next step would be to allocate time each week to review your year folders and organise the documents into topic folders.
For example, anything related to insurance can be placed in an insurance folder.
How deep you go after that will depend on you. I don’t go any further than that. I have three insurance documents. Car, health and home insurance. And given that these are now organised by year, if, in the unlikely event, I need to retrieve my 2019 health insurance documents, it would be very easy to find them.
I would suggest starting at the current year and working backwards. The chances of you needing to find a document from ten years ago are slim. The need to find a 2025 document would be much higher.
So start with your 2025 folder and work backwards.
Don’t be tempted to pre-set up your year folders with subfolders by topic. No one year will be the same.
In 2016, I was teaching English to executives in Korea—something I no longer do. I have a lot of teaching materials; I don’t want to throw away those, and they go up to 2020, so I have folders for those years related to my English teaching activities. After 2020, those folders are no longer in my files.
Once you have the year folders set up, it’s relatively quick and easy to get things organised. The important thing is not overthink this or to develop an overly complex folder structure.
My advice is two levels and no more. The year folder and the subject material. For example, 2024 > Electric bills.
Now, there is a category of documents that you need access to across multiple years.
For example, my car’s manual is something I will need to keep for as long as I have my current car.
For these types of documents, you can create a folder called “current” or “active” (you decide the best name for it) and keep these in there.
So, in my current folder, I have my company registration documents, my car’s manual and registration documents, current insurance certificates, and other miscellaneous files I need access to regularly. This folder is pinned to the top of my file folders (you can do this by adding a 00 before the word Current, then setting the list to organise by name).
Now for your work documents.
This one is more challenging, as you’re likely to be collaborating with others.
There may also be legal requirements regarding document storage and archiving. When I worked in a law office, there were strict rules about how files were organised and stored, and for how long they were kept.
However, that was not my concern. There were procedures that my colleagues and I followed for each file, and they were then sent to the archivist, who made sure that everything was stored in the correct way.
My advice here would be to follow your company’s procedures; if there are none, use the system I described above for your personal files.
Another challenge we face today is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are encouraging us to keep files within their app containers.
For instance, if you create a Word document, Microsoft wants you to save that file within your OneDrive’s Word folder.
That makes sense, and for the current documents I am creating, I use that system.
However, once I’ve sent feedback to my coaching clients, I save the original Pages file in that client’s folder (I work in the Apple ecosystem).
These folders are not year-specific. Many of my clients have been with me for years, and many of them come back from time to time.
That is why, with work-related files, using years to organise your documents doesn’t always work—particularly with ongoing projects, campaigns and clients.
Given that most work related files and documents are shared with others and are kept within the company’s own file storage system, the best solution is to ensure that the title you give to these files is something you would naturally search for.
Think how you would find this document in twelve or twenty-four months time.
For example, each year I write a workbook for my Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The title of that document is “2026 Ultimate Productivity Workbook”.
I put the year first because if I were to search for “workbook”, within the results, I would find that the Productivity workshop’s workbooks would all be grouped together by year, making it easy for me to select the right one.
And that neatly leads me to another facet of working with digital files.
Your computer is built for search. It’s the biggest advantage computers have over your own brain. If it’s within your computer’s search scope it will find it within a split second.
Really the only thing you need to do is ensure that you have given the document a title you will be able to search for.
One of my favourite features of this computerised search is to use the “recents” smart list. This shows you all the documents you have worked on recently.
The chances are something you are looking for at work will be something you have worked on recently. You might be writing a report or a proposal in Word, then in the Word app those documents will be at the top of the list.
You may need to change the search setting in the list to last modified, not date created to see this, but it’s a phenomenal way to find a document you need quickly.
What about your notes?
Last weekend, I watched a documentary on the beloved British comedian Sir Ken Dodd. A brilliant comedian and a man who left millions of people in laughter and happiness.
Doddy, for that is what we called him, was in the habit of writing notes after each performance into a notebook. He would write how he felt the performance went, what jokes worked and didn’t work, and what he could do to improve his performance next time.
After his death in 2018, his wife set about saving his immense archive of props, costumes and puppets for the nation.
When it came to his notebooks, there were thousands of them, dating from the 1950s to his death.
His wife asked an archivist to come in to help organise these notebooks into something that could be searched by future comedians. The archivist decided to most logical way would be to organise them by year, and then add a tag for each theatre and city he performed in.
This meant that if someone wanted to search for a specific note, they could type in the year and the name of the city or theatre, and a list of notes for that search would pop up.
Simple, logical and minimised the amount of work required to get them in order.
When it comes to your notes, keeping the structure simple makes sense. With your digital notes, you are organising them for quick search and retrieval.
You don’t need to worry about the date; all decent note-taking apps will date-stamp the creation of a note for you automatically. All you need to do is focus on creating a title for the note that makes sense to you so you can retrieve it years later.
The key to getting your digital files organised is to keep things simple and let your computer do the hard work.
The year folders you create can be reviewed over time. It’s the kind of thing you can do while sitting on the sofa in the evening. Pick a year and categorise the documents you have collected for that year. If you do this over a couple of weeks, you will have all your digital files organised and searchable.
I can assure you it’s a wonderful feeling.
Receipts can be organised into a Receipts folder, and within that folder, you can organise them by month. If you need to separate your personal and professional receipts, create a work and personal folder within that month’s receipt folder.
I know that adds a lot of levels, but you are only setting this up once a month, and it won’t take you much more than a minute. Yet, that minute will save you hours later when you need to submit your expenses.
I hope that has helped, Julia. Thank you for your question.
I have a course called Mastering Digital Notes Organisation that shows you a simple yet effective way to get your notes organised so they are searchable and easy to find. I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.