How to determine if your folder structure is right for you
Datum: 2025-10-16 12:32
How do you create a good folder structure? Many people ask themselves that — well actually, many people ask me.
My answer is that there is no one folder structure that is objectively the best and the one everyone should have. Rather, it depends on the nature of your business, the natural route you take to find something you need, and how collaboration works in your particular organization.
For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:
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However, we do have some guiding aspects to help us determine what would suit us best:
- The different levels of the structure should be the concepts, terms, or categories by which it feels natural to sort documents and files (such as year, organizational unit, document type, phase in a process, customer, mission, and so on).
- The ways of sorting are combined into a (tree-) structure.
- There needs to be a place for each type of document or file (which does not have to be file type, but can just as well be something else that characterizes that particular type) so that something does not end up somewhere in a different place “just for now”.
- In each location, there should be only one type at a time. If there are many different varieties in one place, it gets messy.
In what order, then?
Fine, but what if I want both folders for different projects and folders for different customers, and each customer can be involved in several projects and each project involves several customers? Which should come first — the projects or the customers? The question is a very common folder-structure question I get, so let me use it as an example to illustrate how I believe you should approach this predicament.
The “right order” is determined by and depends on what is important for you (or whoever it is) who needs to store the documents correctly and to find them easily. For now, let us ignore all the possibilities of searching and tagging “across” the folders and just focus on the structure itself.
What will be easy and what will be difficult?
If you make it clear to yourself (and to whatever colleagues need to know) what will be easy and what will be difficult with the two alternative structures, you will get an indication of which structure will be best for you.
If it is important to be able to easily find all the material related to each client involved in a particular project, put the project folders at the top and the client folders (for each project) in these. The disadvantage is that it will be more difficult to quickly find all the material from the different projects a certain customer has been involved in because the information will be distributed across different project folders (and yes, you can search by customer name and get all the customer folders from the different projects in one view, but we were not supposed to focus on that aspect right now).
However, if it is important to be able to easily find all the material related to each project a customer has been involved in, put the customer folders at the top and the project folders in these instead. The disadvantage here is that it becomes more difficult to quickly find all the material for a particular project because it is scattered throughout different customer folders.
Do this
If you are thinking about how to organize the folder structure of documents you want to keep in better order, do this:
- Sketch the options you are choosing between regarding how you want to structure your folders on a sheet of paper. You do not need to draw all the folders, just enough to make the structure clear.
- For each option, write what will be easy and what will be difficult if you decide to organize folders this way.
- Choose the option where what is most important to you will be easy and where you can live with something being difficult. You cannot have everything.
More order over time
By making it clear to yourself what the implications of different folder structure options will be both to you and the business you work in, it will be easier for you and your colleagues to create a folder structure that you are comfortable with. The structure is more likely to last longer because it serves you well, and less likely to become cluttered and your document management sluggish.
How do you do it?
How have you achieved a folder structure that works well? Feel free to write to me and share your thoughts and experiences.
(Just like having an organized folder structure, it can be helpful to create routines for your documents and files. Learn more here about why a a new document gets old quickly!)
You can get even more tips!
If you want more tips on how to create good structure at work, there are many ways to get that from me - in podcasts, videos, books, talks and other formats.
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