If you produce large amounts of data in your work every day, organizing it all can be a daunting task. The more we use the cloud, the more clutter we create, which in turn lowers our productivity.
Organizing your virtual space is just as important as decluttering your physical space. We wouldn't shove a stack of loose papers into a filing cabinet, would we? Likewise, we shouldn't keep piles of unorganized files in our cloud storage.
Set aside a little time and organize your cloud storage so that you can easily find and access the exact file you want, right when you want it. While we know there is no one right way to organize your files, here are nine easy steps we recommend to declutter your files in WorkDrive.
1. Optimize your Team Folders
Organizing your Team Folders is the first step towards decluttering your WorkDrive storage. You don't have to stuff all your users and files in one Team Folder. Create separate Team Folders for each department or project, add relevant team members, and work together seamlessly.
Analyze user activities on files based on actions like upload, move, rename, trash, and restore. This helps you stay up to date on what is happening with your files and keep them organized. You can also decide who can create Public and Private Team Folders (admins only or anyone).
2. Convert files automatically
When you convert an existing file to a Zoho office suite format, it generally saves the original document and creates a new copy in your WorkDrive account, resulting in two copies of the same document.
To avoid that, WorkDrive has an option to automatically convert newly uploaded documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to the respective Zoho Writer, Sheet, or Show format. This way, your teams can avoid file duplication and start working on files right away.
3. Reduce clutter using storage limits
Every employee has their own storage needs, and those can change from time to time. That's why WorkDrive offers single shared storage for your entire organization. To minimize clutter, WorkDrive's storage limit option helps you restrict your team users from keeping unwanted files in their My Folders. If needed, you can limit storage to incentivize users to only keep the necessary files.
4. Leverage file versioning
In many teams, multiple people work on one file and may end up creating multiple copies of the same document to save different versions. WorkDrive's file versions feature automatically saves all versions of a document in one file. Not only does this help you avoid duplication but also allows you to refer to previous versions without losing new updates.
5. Label your files
Being able to find and access the right files on time can improve your productivity. Individual users can categorize documents using Labels based on their priority, status, or task, and separate all those items under each Label.
6. Conquer clutter with a structured data repository
If multiple documents are added daily, it can be challenging to keep your Team Folders organized. With WorkDrive's Data Templates, you can classify files at a team level. Just create Data Templates, add custom fields, and associate the required files and folders with them. This makes it easy to search for and access files faster.
7. Choose your Favorites
If there are certain files that you will use more often than others, add those documents to your Favorites and access them without any extra steps.
8. Manage trashed data
One important step in decluttering your cloud storage is to get rid of unwanted files permanently, while still being able to recover any accidentally deleted documents. To tackle this issue, WorkDrive has introduced data retention policies to manage your deleted files.
9. Schedule time for regular maintenance
In addition to these simple methods of organizing your cloud storage, we recommend creating a maintenance schedule for keeping your WorkDrive account clutter-free. This scheduled storage maintenance could be set for a specific day of the month or week, or even at a particular time of each day. Use that time to look over your folders, move misplaced files to their correct locations, and add more structure your storage.
If you’ve been avoiding a digital declutter because it seems a tedious process, we hope this guide will help you get started. Following these nine simple steps will set you on the path to an organized cloud storage space.
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