Why you should stop using folders to organize your content

It’s the early 1900’s. Henry Ford is hard at work building a form of transportation, faster than horses. After consulting with a few customers, he decides to stick an electric-powered propeller on the horse’s rear end. The horse speeds up, people get to cheaply upgrade their existing transportation solutions, and Ford becomes rich. Everybody’s happy. Well, maybe except for the horses.

The famous quote “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” might be wrongly attributed to Ford, but the moral applies.

It’s 2007. The iPhone has just been announced, there’s this new thing called Facebook that’s spreading around, and Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox, thinks to himself — we already have folders for organizing our files, so what we really need now is to put them online. Brilliant, right? Well, yes, but also — not so much.

The issue with folders

Don’t get me wrong, folders are great for some things. They imitate the way we did things in the old days. Take a file, put it in a folder, and as long as you have a system — you can probably find it later.

But — and this is a big but — folders are a terrible way to organize your company’s files. Here’s why:

Number of folders

If you’re using Dropbox for personal use (or Google Drive, or OneDrive, or any other folder-based file storage), you probably don’t have this issue. You might create 5-10 main folders, with a few subfolders under them. That’s perfectly manageable.

However, if you’re a part of a 30-person organization, you probably have a bit more than that. Actually, after checking many company drives, we found that a 30-person company usually has a few hundreds of folders and subfolders, some of them four or five levels down the hierarchy tree.

Thinking about it, even in the old days, using folders on large scale was difficult — that’s why you’re not allowed to put books back in place yourself in libraries, and why police archives always have an archive manager who’s the only one who knows how to get the file.

💡 Using TagBox’s smart tags instead of folders can actually reduce the number of labels used by up to 80%. TagBox analyzes your folder structure and suggest places where you can merge and re-arrange your folders.

Misalignment of taxonomy

It’s not only the quantity. Theoretically, if everyone in the company used the exact same taxonomy, it will be possible for others to find what they need. Unfortunately, that’s almost never the case. Different people use different methods and naming conventions, which makes it almost impossible for others to navigate.

Think about it — at your company, say you attended a meeting, and the other person wrote meeting notes — what are the chances you can find those yourself? Chances are you’d need to email them asking for it, and then wait fr them to see it and find the time to reply.

💡 As part of TagBox’s integration process with file managers, the platform maps similar folder names into a single tag. For example, we might suggest you map ‘files’ and ‘documents’, or ‘slides’ and ‘presentations’ into a single tag, to stay consistent.

Single location

Your personal files belong in your personal drive. But company documents are often relevant for multiple people, or even departments. A legal document might be relevant to multiple projects; a new template might be used by multiple departments, and needs to be kept up-to-date by everyone; and of course, HR forms and training materials are often cross-department.

Some companies try to put these files in a shared folder. But since people don’t use that folder often, they tend to lose track and it ends up not getting updated, with people still opting for emailing the person who made the docs.

In other cases, you might just have the file sent to you and re-save it to your drive. But then when there’s are updates, you start to have version issues. And if there are comments on the content, those might get lost and not seeing on all copies.

💡 Unlike with folders, there’s no limit to the number of tags a file can have. Linking the content to multiple places at once allows for more flexible navigation, so there’s no need to duplicate content.

The singularity is here

There’s no doubt: Houston created a very fast horse. It was so fast, that all of the big players — Google, Microsoft, Apple — all started making their horses faster as well. Their definitely better than the old, slower ones, but are they really what we need?

With recent advances in AI, and specifically in natural language processing, it has become easier to connect information. This works great all over the internet. With Netflix and Spotify, no one today would consider keeping all their movies or songs into neatly organized folders. How would that even work? Will you organize by artist? By year? by Genre? How silly would it be to pick one option, when you can use all of them at once?

We at TagBox believe it’s high time to Nexflixify your organizational content. Wanna give it a try? Start here.