How I Organize My Google Drive (No More Digital Junk Drawer)
I’m sharing how to transform your chaotic Google Drive into a streamlined hub for your files. Having a centralized system to save time and reduce frustration is vital, especially if you work with a team. I’m sharing practical steps to create an intuitive organization that works across various platforms to improve your digital workflow.
Transcript below!
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00:00 Hey, if your digital life and work feels like one big, where did I put that? This video is for you.
00:09 My name's Ellie. I am the founder and CEO of Calibrated Concepts, uh, which is a small business that sort of helps people with the techie side of things.
00:19 Um, I want to show you how to turn your messy Google Drive into an intuitive, easy to use hub. My, now this, these principles will work whether I use Google Drive, um, Microsoft Office or whatever it is called these days.
00:37 Um, or if you are using Dropbox or any other thing, and I just kinda kept going, why is there no centralized system, and I'm training around it, um, and it drove me nuts.
00:54 So a clean file drive saves you time, energy, decision fatigue, um, and As I always say, your system should serve your life, your business should serve your life, not the other way around.
01:10 So, first off, if you don't already have one, choose a home base. I use Google Drive and I will be showing this demo in Google Drive, but these principles work, like I said, and Dropbox Notion, anywhere else that you're doing this.
01:25 Um, make sure This is not just for you, though. If you have a team, especially, this is critical. There's one central place that everything lives, and there's a way that everyone understands on where things go, what to call them, how to find them, etc.
01:50 So if it's not in the drive, it doesn't exist. Before we get started, I want to just say a couple quick tips and then we'll dive into the demo.
02:02 Um, the first thing is we're going to show, I'm going to show you my file structure and I want you to know that less is more, um, with this kind of thing.
02:13 You want to make it as easy and clean and streamlined as possible. So let's start the demo. Alright, welcome to the demo.
02:22 Um, so this is my personal Google Drive. There will be some things I can't show you for client confidentiality and but otherwise I am so excited to show you how I do this and how I do this with myself and often with clients except for theirs as tweaked and customized for their needs and their business
02:38 and their language. Um, so first I have A really clear file structure with the types of content that I hold in my Google Drive.
02:48 Client work content, content, we'll get into that in a moment, but contracts or legal finances, learning, marketing, um, meat recording, so that's Google meat recordings, um, mentoring that I've done a networking group that I run, um, personal stuff that just occasionally appears.
03:08 And that file is actually shared with my personal Google account, um, team files, and then the capable collective, which is another business I used to run and is still the name of my podcast.
03:21 So all the files for that live in there. Under client work, and I won't go too deep into any of these, but under client work, I have an archive of all my past clients, and I categorized it as by year.
03:33 I have my new client docs. Some of these are old and probably could be Tidy even further, but I like having them from reference.
03:42 Um, and this is the main one I use here. I send this client, uh, this content branding workbook to all of my website clients.
03:51 Um, I also wanted to show you because I couldn't show you my clients that I also keep a file for every single one of my active clients just usually sitting here in the client work project.
04:02 Um, I've tucked them into this folder here for hidden for video. But in here, I typically title this as client name, project type, and date that they've started.
04:13 So you can see that here, project start date. Um, and that helps things be really, really clear for myself and my team about what's coming up and what we are have going on.
04:23 Under content, this is pretty well, pretty robust. I have, uh, blog content, collaborations I've done, um, digital offers, design assets, podcast assets.
04:34 That is Shortcutted back to the capable collective so to my podcast. Um, templates, swipe copy, all sorts of things in here.
04:42 So if you go to blog post done, there are loads and loads and you can see they are super titled for what the content is.
04:51 Um, under say design, I have background images, um, and they're all categorized as well and I used to buy, like, get a lot of stock things and so they're all really, really.
05:05 I just have a lot of assets, a design asset. So I've got those in here and Feedback case studies, freebies like all sorts of things in here.
05:16 Um, I've got a website copy for my own website and resources around that over the years. I also have graphics of websites I've designed.
05:27 Now some people would say that this Those could live under photos, um, they could, but for me, it makes more sense to keep these pretty close together.
05:38 So, um, finances. I've got these organized by various years. Um, you can see that when I was in the UK, these were done from their fiscal year runs from like April 5th through April 4th every year, whereas now that I'm in the US, it's just going to be one year.
05:53 I have some templates and, um, my end of month spreadsheet, and you can see if I go into that, those are labeled like this almost every time.
06:02 This one is incorrect. So it should say 2025 at the end of that. And that way it's just really easy to search for the appropriate thing.
06:14 So, I don't want to get too much into all this. We've got all my meat recordings. I can't show you those, but those are organized by client or, um, Recording who I'm recording with.
06:26 I have, um, some team files, so this is going to be headshots, contracts with the team, get to know you forms, uh, resumes, those kinds of things in here.
06:38 And then we have my other business which has a lot of the same type of content, um, and file system, but it was a shorter run business only around this for about a year and a half.
06:48 And so it's very different, um, but I wanted to tuck it in here as well. It's also got all the podcast content and here under its content.
06:56 It's own content library. So that is how I structure everything. I wanted you to be really clear that I name files really consistently.
07:04 I'm really detailed with them. I want them to be searchable. Um, I also mark my template. So if I put template in here, first off, they're typically template here, and then we've got template listed in the title as best as possible.
07:20 If I go to Advanced Search, Sorry, if I actually just open that search further, you will see I have quite a lot of templates.
07:28 And, um, it makes it really easy for me to find them if I title them correctly. If other little tips for organizing your Google Drive, you'll notice that anything that I want to appear right at the top, I've had a little dot-in, both in documents and in folders, and that means they will always be the
07:50 first thing on the left. And at least in this structure, I like this organization, I'm not as big of a fan of this, um, however some people are.
08:03 So, that's really helpful, is to use that to keep things organized. I also will sometimes put a Z if I wanted to just follow the very end, because it's something that maybe is an archive.
08:17 Okay, so, If you, the next thing is once you've got things really well organized and really well named, you are going to want to keep things clean.
08:30 Schedule in a time whether that be monthly or quarterly or even annually depending on how many files you have. To go in and double check that everything is filed away correctly.
08:40 Um, that there's no just like straggling files. There's always going to be a couple of use. I have a couple here, but they were filed away as best as possible in all these subfolders that they're named well, um, and yeah, and one of the easiest ways to do this is to go in and search to organize things
09:00 by You know, most recently modified, were oldest modified to help you clean up and get rid of maybe old files.
09:08 Um, I also highly recommend for template type files, or to, or um, SOP type files, lots of types of files to have a, um, last modified date, right at the top of the document, so that your whole team can see, oh, It hasn't been changed in a couple of years, maybe it's time or, oh, we changed this recently
09:32 , but maybe it didn't change, um, it changes process recently, but maybe it's not reflected in the document. Um, using shortcut folders is something we've already talked about, but making sure to multi-home things by letting them live in more than one place, by going to organize and adding a shortcut
09:51 . And that really helps, um, things to be able to live in more than one place, also sharing files, right? Like we talked about.
10:01 Please delete files that you don't need anymore. Digital hoarding is still hoarding. I'm gonna do a couple quick things here.
10:09 One is make my little face figure for you guys, I've noticed. The other is, I haven't been working out of this Google Drive with all this content you've seen for years and I still only have 85 gigs because I'm not afraid to delete things.
10:21 So, please be okay. Sometimes deleting things. Digital hoarding is still hoarding. Alright, so here's some tips and tools to make it really easy for yourself.
10:32 Um, depending on how you work, I'm really happy dropping everything, so I will go into my own personal thing and I'll just drop like a file vault in here.
10:41 And then I'll organize it as I see fit, right? So that file will go into content and then your desktop and in the cloud, and you don't have to think about it.
11:17 Um, and it makes things easy to keep things in both places. They also have, um, you can also bookmark specific links if you use them a lot.
11:29 Sorry, I've got my notes over here. You don't notice. And, um, Creating shareable links, so sharing people with other Google Drive users or, um, with your team, so my content, a lot of this file, is shared with my team, and you can see people who have access to various parts of this, and if I go to share
11:51 , I can adjust who has access, I can copy a link and send it to my team, et cetera. My, the funnest bit in my opinion is color coding.
12:03 You can see all my files have fun colors. Um, by default, these are gray, like with, with Google. By default, everything's kind of this color.
12:15 And I think it's nicer and funner to have things color coded. Some clients I will actually color code specific in their branding.
12:22 Some of them mine's a little willy nilly, but, um, I might have it be themed so that all specific types of files and folders are a specific color.
12:32 So maybe all the financial folders are green. All right. That is that. I hope that you found that helpful, um, move my little face up here for you so that I can talk to you.
12:47 But essentially, as a quick recap, pick a really good foundation of where you want to host your files, um, pick a, use a really simple but robust filing structure, use Consistent and very clear naming conventions.
13:06 You can search at your team, search for things. Use some maintenance. And once you have all this set up, you know, make sure that everybody knows this is the naming convention.
13:16 This is where this type of file goes. Um, this is how often we are going to maintain this system. And these are the tools that we use to make the system even easier for us.
13:26 So if you found this helpful, please like, comment, subscribe. If you, um, Feel like you have more digital clutter and admin frustrations in your life that you would like some help with.
13:40 I have a really useful quiz. It's free. It's got so many good resources for you. Um, you can find it down in the description, along with some other fun resources.
13:49 Alright, again, I'm Ellie. I'm from Calibrated Concepts. Have a good day.
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