The Following Programs Are Typically Included In A Productivity Suite, With The Exception Of?

I became an office manager and personal assistant out of the blue with little admin skills from my various jobs over the years. It just fell in my lap from a referral. Now I’m scrambling to fill in the gaps in my skills to run the office on my own and I feel rather incompetent at times. I’ve been searching for skill-building tools, and yours has been a huge answer to my ask. Hoping I find more on your website to support my growth with the amazing chiropractor/trainer of mastery for chiropractors across the country that I now support. Thank you so much for this wonderful training!!!

I use to create an alphabetical list of main folders (AB,CD,EF…etc) where each folder has sub-folders with their labels for the main topics (personal, work, projects,personal info etc) .It may look quite simple to you, however is so practical when arrives a moment to search any file, moreover the back-up disk has the same structure, so when an updated is needed, all the repeated files are no copied (unless the “weight” is different) ….Your tutorial gives me a new perspective and fresh ideas….Thank you so much Miss David.

Nice summary, but my main and really only problem is where to put files that cross multiple topics/projects/issues. I label them fine but months later are the database files, meeting, personal, etc. What happens when I want, for example, to see all my database files. But that means I need to put all my personal, professional, etc, in one place. So now I have work and personal stuff in the same place. If I separate them out, then I have to “hunt” for all the files across my computer. Sometimes I never find them again. Lastly, the most incredibly annoying thing is Window’s using the same name but not the same location for folders. I put something (during a ‘save as’ operation) in the “my documents” folder. Later when I want to look at it, it’s not there, nor on the desktop version or cloud, etc.. It’s usually buried somewhere else. It’s frustrating. I wish MS would stop trying to help me and I could just do everything manually so I know where I put the files and then where to find them.

Thanks a lot for sharing this. I’ve always used a hierarchy in my file system to store and find files afterwards, and I’ve been doing it for more 25 years now. Nonetheless, this article can still ispire me better solutions and an even ‘cleaner’ approach. Managing and organizing files in a very healthy way has always been a very neglected issue, leaving it all to the personal approach, which sometimes is simply not as efficient as it should be. Keep it up Lea, great work!

Lea – Good article. Comprehensive. Good tips. Here are 5 ideas for consideration. 1 – MECE – Every hierarchical system should attempt to conform to the MECE principle. It is a method of grouping information (like into folders), so that the groups (folders) are mutually exclusive (ME) and collectively exhaustive (CE). In other words, the content of the groups (folders) do not overlap and nothing falls through the cracks. – – – The MECE methodology is commonly used by consulting firms. When most people (including me) start out developing groups (folders) in a hierarchical system, they aren’t likely going to conform to the MECE method. As weeks and months roll by, a person typically will add more groups (folders). At some point in time, the person has so many groups (folders and subfolders), it becomes more and more of a challenge for a person to remember the structure of his/her groups (folders) and to find the group (folder) where he/she previously put a specific item (file, in this case). Also, it is common when adding a new item (file) that it is realized that it could logically be added to more than one group (folder). This will make it even harder to remember in the future which group (folder) it was it put in. – – – The MECE method helps to minimize, if not completely eliminate, those problems. 2 – Tags – In some examples in the article, information was added to a file’s label/title that I call “metadata”. That is, it is information “about’ the file, not information “in” the file.

Thanks for showing practical advice on this very important topics in life! I’m sure people will have to further modify to fit individual life. But, the message of “there are better ways” is critical. ****** For those who are concerning not able to find the wanted file buried inside the directory tree, Window’s File Explorer has a very robust “search” function that can search entire directory tree. So, as long as you name the filename and directory name with needed keywords about files, searching is easy!

I realize this is an older article. First, excellent article. I’ve been in the computer industry since 1990 in roles ranging from customer support all the way up to development manager and tech project manager, with a bit of architect thrown in. I’ve used all three methods over the decades in my personal data that I rarely had time to worry about. Today, that has resulted in a fourth storage method. I call it the Where The Heck did I put that method. Now that I’m retired I am trying to get my own life and data back in order. I really appreciate your articles. it’s great to go back and review. The hard part is now converting my WTH to the hierarchy method, which I believe is still the best method for storage.

I was really, really hoping that you would talk about organizing photos and music. My photos are automatically well organized by date but never by content! When I was storing them in Google Drive I set up links to add a content overlay but when I migrated everything to Microsoft OneDrive, they all broke because the paths are different. Plus I can’t follow the links easily on my iPad and Android phone. When I rip CDs (I prefer to own my music rather than renting it), I wind up with inaccurate metadata that I have to correct manually. This includes inconsistent disk naming of multi disk sets, unnecessary composer and performer names that get injected into the hierarchical folder storage, and incorrect track data.

Good advice. I’ve been using a hierarchy for tasks and for filing : 1) Area of life (personal, home/family/friends, work, community) 2) Role (eg father, husband, engineer, line manager, functional safety specialist) 3) Client (for work-related stuff), person, organisation or group 4) Project My projects are sorted into: 0-actions and minutes 0-management (separate subfolders as needed for budget, resources, programme, safety, ) 1-inputs (site info, requirements, guidance, usually then in subfolders by yy-mm-dd date received) 2-WIP (work in progress) 3-issued outputs I have a separate set of folders for reference materials, sub-divided into topics (David Allen’s GTD methodology suggests keeping the reference library separate from project files). There is a fourth file organisation method you’ve missed, which is used by MS Sharepoint and other document management software: using metadata instead of a rigid folder structure. With a few metadata fields to cover the questions who, what, where and when, you can then organise your files in multiple filtered and sorted views, making it much easier to find documents by whatever criteria are important to you.

Good one! I’ve long used hierarchical, frequently using 3-digit numerical prefix (e.g. Book Writing projects. Having written over a hundred books, 3 digits required). Also, love the suggestion of yearMonthDay sequence. Helps to keep things properly organized by date, where optimum. And good advice on file path limitations. If folder identity becomes too cryptic, I will add a 0_filename.txt file which sorts to the top with further description of contents. Sometimes this can be in the filename itself, and other times I will add a longer description in the file contents, e.g. 0_Contents.txt — “Research on local dinosaur species for Pangaea Sister Sites.”

The more time you spend organising, the less time you have creating and maximising profits for bosses and yourself. Search function is your friend. Bosses don’t care how you make money for them as long as you max their profits and don’t get them, their ego and their company into legal or financial troubles.

Personally, like a lot of people I use the Hierocracy method. Although they all start out with the common place markers used on most computer OS systems (Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music etc). I start with folders commonly included on Linux as it’s easy to create shortcuts no matter what OS you use or switch between as they’re all pretty similar. The only other default folders I add is a “_Settings” folder (where I can put any type of setting, profile or configuration file relevant for programs), a “Work” folder for my work stuff (obviously) and a “Temp” (or working) folder for storing temporary stuff I can easily delete. I suppose you could split your documents folder into work & personal, but that’s just another extra level to contend with. My folders are always on either a separate drive or partition, again making it easy if you change between operating systems After the work folder, I split them into financial years (i.e 2021-2022, 2022-2023 etc). I also do something similar in email. So each year has a very similar structure in terms of the types of folders (like suppliers, reports, expenses etc), but they’re all grouped under a year range. It makes it easy to collapse everything to hide, archive or if you still need to search for something. The main thing is try and pick something that works for you and stick with it. Be stringent with the structure you choose and make sure you rename files to something meaningful (other than the default your phone may use such as photo_1234567_89.

Thanks for article since it is an important topic ! I use hierarchy system. However, I constantly update the structure to minimize the average search time (i.e. minimize overall time spent on searching). Vision is to have 5-10 folders in each folder and name and arrange the files so that each folder is roughly used similar in amount. I do not use numbering since I think it is easier to remember and faster to access by pressing first letter on keyboard. However, somethimes, I rename the start of folders and files to todays date to make them sort (I use autohotkey=windows or autokey=ubuntu for this). For temporary increased work on a particular sub folder, I use links on the top-level to jump directly there. Good luck! ❤👍📂💻

My drives tend to be Pareto-esque. The 20% of topics that I return to 80% of the time are organized by topic (L0) and sub topic (L1). The rest is a ‘dump’ that gets segregated into ‘archive’ folders by general type (document, picture, etc.), if I haven’t needed them in over a year. Not ideal, but I don’t spend a lot of time organizing meaningless (but hard to discard entirely) files. Meanwhile, the active files are right where I expect them.

I LOVE IT! I try to avoid folders as it makes file metadata more linear and doesn’t levarage sorting/the search engine or allow a document to exist in to locations. I incorporate folders structure into my file name with a period as the delimiter. It flattens the structure.and leverages some of the MS365 and One Drive features. 🙂

I agree hierarchical folder structure is a good strategy. I will add the following to the narrative. 1. My Documents is the worst place to store documents. Keep them in a separate folder which is not in Users/ path. You will have a better control over, copying data to a different machine and backup strategy. 2. There is no need to use folders for emails. Google did not have a real concept of folders in gmail for a long time. I was frustrated. But now I understand. Apply tags to your emails. That’s it. Let the computer do the work. Teach yourself how to search effectively more than organizing.

Wow, first time seen yours. I do basically the same being a preacher. Mine is a year folder, then Quarter. The files are 20230507ams -name of file – SLIDE that being a Keynote presentation. I use OUTLINE for you guest it outline of lessons, WEB for something usually a graphic for the web of the lesson. So I wind up with 4 with 3 months in a quarter. I haven’t seen a need for a monthly. Within the quarter I have folders labeled KEYNOTES, OUTLINES and NOTECARDS.the lies go each week in their perspective folder. Enjoyed the article.

Rule #1 Every file in ur syste should be withing a folder that represents it. Rule #2 Have a structure to find files and folders quickly and well. Tree structure. Root > Life buckets Organzing by category. Organizing by Date File should be named specifically. Rule #3 Use cloud sync folder. Google one is good. Seperate backup drive. Use shortcuts and quick access to access deep files rq. Essentialism. (phone) collect in straight line without any bs shitt.

I guess I’m doing better than i thought. After perusal the article I’m doing it right except i don’t use 01, 02 and so on . The thing i wanted to change was how many layers deep i have to go to find anything . i do hit the max file length at times. A lot of times I’m 10- 12 subfolders deep, it to many clicks . At work i even put current projects folder on the desktop for ease of access and i still find myself 6-10 subfolders in. Makes me chuckle every time the boss complains about how many folders i use because he will also complain when it looks unorganized.

for your folder naming convention, that’s just for you personally, as you grow and more people work with your folder there will always be one+ employee who doesn’t know all the numbers and as your business grows so will your folders and your structure will later have a combination of your first two examples 😀 But if you give the folder a proper naming convention, then you can improve your system. as Example for Projects we use numbers or characte to Sorting the folder but not nessasary. (L0) Projects –> (L1) Proj_Customer_AB –> (L2) Proj_AB_Admin // Proj_AB_Admin Pro_AB_Input as an example. And 3-5 Layers are aswell wrong a Lot of People say maximun a Tree with 7 but that is way to much. 4 layer are bare maximum for most Productivity, your Brain can not more information store. With 4*4*4*4 = 256 Folders how tidy are you sorting invoices 😜. Same with Namekonvention for files, 20220413 is not human readable its an old stupid Namenkonvention that comes from how we store files and shows the por quality of Microsoft and Windows.

The Biggest issue is that an item can have 1 and ONLY 1 main topic. Much better is a Hierarchy Tag based system where each item can have multiple tags and the tags are also hierarchy based. So for example, a Raspberry-Pi LED Lamp project could have the Following tags: Electronics: Raspberry Pi: LEDs: Lamps Electronics: Soldering Priority: Top-To-Do

I had already figured a few of these by myself and honestly the windows explorer just feels so primitive and limited. We’re basically just working with file names and folder structures. Why the hell do we not have tagging systems and metadata editing as a default windows tool? Imagine being able to easily filter or search your files based on things like author, rating, status, or even create your own tags and metadata fields to organize them. Being able to tag categories on a file level instead of being forced to create a folder or naming convention for each category. It’s nothing revolutionary, we should’ve had this for a long time now. It makes me baffled.

the numbering of the folder may turn out to be a really bad idea. if you have project name and families, then it will be numbered as they arrive. Let’s take VW cars as example, then if you use the numbering system, looking into 01_Golf_I, 02_Polo_I, 03_Golf_II, 04_Passat_I, 05_Polo_II, 06_Golf_III… will be way more difficult than, Golf_I, Golf_II, Golf_III Passat_I, Polo_I, Polo_II,… The numbering system is good to re-organize a folder when the alphabetical names does not work as wished. like you did for 00_Admin with your “1st semester”, “2nd semester”… The Pre-fixing of names by datecode YYYYMMDD is superb as then all documents are ordered sequentially irrelevant whether they have been accessed/modified at a later date.

(Most) file systems are lagging a fourth mechanism for organizing content: tags. Files such as pictures are problematic because you may want to find the “red Ferrari picture from summer of 2012” but not sure if it should search it from cars-, 2012-, travel or the red folder… Tags would find it with any of the keywords. Hierarchical approach is superior once you identify the most important branches for your own scenario, and yes prefixing filenames with YYYYMMDD is the key. However never, ever add “final” or “new” anywhere in the filenames…

Do you have any recommendation on Email filing from a business point of view, my thought pattern currently, which i am trying to work through, is that i work on the concept of the heirachy stucture for filing, and rather save the attachments, and or final email thread, to the folder structure for the client(s), and then delete the actual email – i am using O365 exchange,

Well I guess I am using meta hierachical structures. Different machines for different fields (work, study, private, lab, …) and on these the basic L0 unix file structure. L1 lives in /home/foo which technically is L2, but I only have a user per machine. So my L2 is mostly living in /home/foo/documents which contains all kinds of /books /projects /painting /coding … Since zfs and other unix file systems don’t have limitations on path lengths I can go down the rabbit hole from L2. Sorting /books by rough topics (art, tech, coding, science, …) and then get more and more granular (art > sign painting -> german typography -> early 20th century -> Handbücher der Plakat und Kunstschriften > 1929 -> Die Kunst und Plakatschrift, M. Austermann). For documents like protocols of course the date-context-meeting (20230517-my-awesome-project-board-meeting or 20230517-mapbm).

Great presentation on this idea. It is well worth it in the long term. I would add that it may help to add a LONGEVITY capability, i.e. I have a “trash” folder (need the data < 1 day or <1 week) as well as a "_Forever" folder in some topics (i.e. never lose). That can help both reduce data clutter and archiving. Other topics like Photos I organize Year folder > Topic, etc. Working in IT, I’ve done hierarchical storage for many years. At first I thought it was crazy, too much effort… but soon (and with more data) the value became clear. Now looking at someone else’s drive with random or mass dump? … makes me scream. 😱

Using Windows 365 you don’t need to think about archiving. Living in China Windows 365 is not a realistic option for me as I don’t want anybody else to have access to them. My notebook drive is not endless large and I don’t want to have an external drive always attached. So archiving is needed (at least some day). On the very top level I have 0000 private – 0000 work – 2022 private, 2022 work – 2023 private – 2023 work and next year will be continued like that. From January 1st I just save in the current year folder. If a project has started in the previous year, I probably copy the complete folder to the next year to avoid searching in two years for a file I want to find. Only a few activities are time independent: list of gifts for my grand children (to avoid duplicates), my password safe file, my outlook.pst files (which I organize by year as well as deletion is not appropriate. With the change of the calendar year a new set of folders are opened 2024 xyz with the same or slightly different structure below, the previous year folder will be completely archived, and NOT AT ALL used for any updates (but not yet deleted). The previous year folder will almost no longer be needed in April, so I delete on my notebook I have it already archived (and not changes since then ) before.

She has an Admin folder at every level. What goes in there/these? Maybe this is her version of a folder I use in work projects called Source where original unedited (or versioned) foundation/inspiration material is kept. I personally don’t find her method that useful. Numbering your folders leads to artificial importance, especially if the structure/contents within various containing folders isn’t consistent; suddenly “03” has a totally different content/context than in other folders. Just name your folders/files for what they contain/are; this allows you to navigate/find by typing the first letter(s) then use a keyboard shortcut (return (PC), cmd-O or cmd-▼ (Mac)) to open the folder/file. On a Mac, you don’t necessarily have to open the file: once a file is selected, press the space bar to use Quick View; space bar again or esc to close the Quick View or continue to Quick View neighboring files using the arrow keys — super fast and easy. Also, good idea adding the date as YYYYMMDD (your computer sorts this naming structure automatically) when it makes sense to do so, but figure out for your own needs and way of thinking if the date should go at the beginning or end of a folder/file name for sorting purposes.

Hierarchy structure — the most beautiful, but least practical approach. Big boss like it, they think it looks well organised like “computer”. However, your managers, supervisors, foreman, or even your big boss can’t remember the categories and sub categories. Thus, if everything is fine, no one complains. If something goes wrong, they cannot remember which sub directly they keep files. In the real world, they will say “no record”, even there is a SOP to instruct them. That’s the problem in real world!!! If you can think about where you put the files in 5 seconds, many people, or your boss will stop you thinking, and go to the simplest answer “no record”. (If you are intelligent enough to remember, your boss will keep asking you questions like google search, interrupt you every 5 minutes, and complain why your performance is decreasing….) My way to organise my files is chaotic storage + mass dumping + searching utility. Like outlook, you can dump all emails in inboxes and create multiple searching/sorting folders based on tag, sender, keywords, etc.. these folders files may overlap but won’t take extra storage spaces. even more, you can do the keyword search on entire emails, including the keywords in some attachments, also can only search the emails in sub-folders. My boss hates me because I use these methods, so every time he said “he didn’t said that”, “why I didn’t keep important files”, “why you make this mistake”… I always send out the history emails out to the related mail groups.

I would say that I am using 3 kinds of data management scheme my notes are foldered but not really accessed hierarchily but rather searched by content and tags. I also considerring using NLP to get better vague search. similarly, my photos are all in one place indexed by time, people, or tags that I manually added to some photos. this kind of structure really only applys to highly indexable data the second would be plain old folder with weak hierarchy. namely, organized but not strictly and not all in one place. This happens really because I cannot put all my data in one root folder and even reconstructing index using symlink have limited help to this issue. resulting in me searching for the nearest keyword most of the time (and it can be faster if you remember those unique keywords the third would be a strong index system that I mainly use for important (legal, medical record, etc.) documents as being able to find them fast is often crucial. a number would be added to each level similar to article headers (ex. 1.1.2.4 means ID/National (as oppose to passport and stuff)/DL/4th document, whatever that is) an additional rule is that, since there are only 10 root folders, all starting single digit folder can be concated except for the leaf id (ex. 21223.3 = 2.1.2.2.3.3) where as (2.1.22.3.3 can only be abbrivated as 21.22.3.3). For different versions for the same file, a hyphen and a one word description would be added. such as 21223.3-rev2

I would not recommend starting the file name swith a date stamp. You will loose the ability to sort files by a Name (file purpose/content). I use the file formats as following: OrignalName_Version_DateStamp. This gives me ability to group files based on the file content first, then by version and date.

I like the article but I don’t see the added value of the 01_, 02_ etc prefix. Any folder gets sorted alphabetically anyway. Also, as you never seem to use a lot of them, the ‘0’ position might even never be used. The underscore doesn’t make much sense either. It’s a habit that made sense in the time that spaces in filenames weren’t allowed. Finally; cloud storage is great for synchronisation, but I strongly advise everyone to keep at least one backup up to date. Cloud storage is not a backup! Don’t say you didn’t know.

I dont like that much the Numbers are the beginning (01, 02..). They are useful in some cases, but i prefer to use the alphabetical order that allows me to find things quicker. Warning about the max length: years ago one of my boss used to organize files with a deep tree structure. This caused problems with some backup tools ina weird way: the tool said that the backup was ok ( maybe done in a not Microsoft file system), but the recovery was not possible due the the max size of the file name and path lenght reached. So.. be careful!

That doesn’t work if you have thousands or millions of files. What is needed is a AI powered file search system, where you can full text search (including synonyms) for any file, including photos and imagines inside pdfs or ppt or informations inside Audio files. So, when you look for files from a previous project you just ask your local AI and it will find for you your files, where ever they are stored. Also this AI takes care of multiple storage drives, clouds, and backups. Its a total waste of time and a outdated behavior to look for files on a hard drive. That’s just my opinion. Maybe someone knows a software that can do that, I would immediately buy it. All the best.

Good search makes hierarchical structure obsolete, slow and inflexible. Clicking around files and folders is just not a good way to show people who interact with data how to store that data. Your “hierarchy” doesn’t make sense for everyone…Also, cloud storage does document versioning and has for years. Keeping drafts is inefficient.

Nice. Learned that in scientific studies at university (agricultural sciences) already in 90s. Then since 25 years since day 1 in job in IT from computer scientists and programmers of the IBM school. Then the “new breed” of gen y and z programmers with user stories and stuff. No matter how perfectly structured this stuff is: as long as you work with more than 4 people at projects and as long as there are frequently people coming and going, this structure will be disturbed or broken or somebody will forget to put in an file into one of the subfolders or whatever. And there will always be someone who will hsve to keep it clean. But mostly the time factor and more important daily things prevent you from that….or a stupid teamleader or worse not understanding

After managing 3 Trusts for 17 years this works for me: – myname\\trustname\\tax2022ty\\organizer-20230509.pdf (and 1040-20230509.pdf, 1099-chase-20230105.pdf, etc) – myname\\trustname\\chase\\statements-20220502.pdf (also mastercardStatement-20220502.csv, etc.) – myname\\important\\fathersWillAndTrustColorHires-20050408.pdf – myname\\important\\history.xlsx – this has one line per important action. Columns are date, tag, action, amount, comment. That comment field has a plain English explanation of what it is. This is useful for the irregular things, for example when I had a fight with the insurance company. In the comments it may have some filenames. I don’t add each and every statement to here, but just the stuff I’m likely to return to, in times when confusing things are happening. My work files are in myname\\companyname\\projectname Important: filenames end in date, not start, because it’s always easy to sort by date. It’s also easy to sort by filename, so they can group nicely I also have a file important\\quarterly.xlsx which I update every quarter with account activity and balances. Of course the filenames have no space, colon, slash, equal, pipe, 絵文字, underline (because it’s hard to see and slower to type than a hyphen – I’m lazy)

I include the file date as suffix so all the same files stay together. For example, “Design research analysis – Data flow Prod 20230520”. Subsequent versions are saved with the same file name and an updated date. If it’s a substantial change within the same day, then I append the time using the 24 hour time so everything sorts in order. For example, if the first analysis was a bad approach but I don’t want to delete my work because I may need it someday I’ll save the new file as …… 29230520-1456

it takes a german to organize a artistic swede´s computer thanks fraulein. 🙂 here my typical day with naming conevetion. ( test001 test_test_01, hey01, lol33) got any good methods when saving? 🙂 latly i just been using this its super easy today ots he 23 of may ( so the name of my file would be 2223_05_23) the filename is the problem. ther is no structure there Normaly i name it after the feeling get, i do geaphic design so it coiuld bre Gray version 01 then its 02

😂 OMG. There are inherent flaws when describing your chaotic system. Your hierarchy structural system is also flawed, especially for companies. It took two decades but I finally settled on an organizational system that combines all three methods, which provides instantaneous data collection and retrieval. My way also extends into other personal and professional aspirations. Please redo this presentation. It is clumsy and outmoded.

That’s an old way of thinking. For example the contracts for project a are in the project a folder, the contracts for project b in the project b folder etc. But now I need all contracts related to customer y… I now need to go into each project and check the contract. I could organise per customer, but then I have the problem when looking for all contracts for project c. I could copy the files, storage is cheap, but then you update one copy and forget about the others. Tagging is the way to go. Then where the files actually are isn’t important.

that’s an interesting system that you have. I particularly liked the numbering in the names of folders to keep them in a fixed order. my digital life at work has never been as complex as yours, so I use a simpler method. I have the Documents folder and, inside it, every weekday in the morning a new folder is created automatically by a job, using the YYYYMMDD pattern for the folder name. so I just copy the files to work on from a previous day or from elsewhere. so it’s like a local version control system. sometimes I upload documents to a company vcs or to a task tracker. and I can always quickly tell the annoying manager what I was busy with on a particular day

I have always used an alphabetical hierarchical files system. I proved the effectiveness of it by showing my computer to someone who had never seen it before and asked her to find a certain invoice.I gave no clue as to where it might be stored. She found it within 10 seconds. Your system of numbering files makes no sense as it destroys the alphabetical logic of the file system. Another aspect I dislike is it took 50% of the article to get down to your system. I have not subscribed.

I’m a CPA and I’ve used hierarchy structure for > 30 yrs. start with main office folder then clients and admin subfolders. Within clients it’s one subfolder per client by ref # then with that by year and within year by file type so 127A23 is client whose ref # is 127 Accounts file 2023. 127P23 would be payroll B would be banking and so on. So the path looks like – office -clients-127-2023-127A23. This also keeps file path character totals as short as possible.