Your Google Drive (or One Drive / Dropbox) is a mess!

It started off as a good idea.

One central place to store and collaborate on all your files. So much better than sending attachments back and forth.

But then it grew

And grew.

People left your organisation. You deleted their stuff and a bunch of shared folders disappeared with them!!

And now you’re spending more time looking for things than creating them!

Here’s a few tips to get control back:

1. Upgrade.

• If you haven’t already, upgrade to the level that gives you shared drives. (Google created a world of pain by not making this standard a long time ago!)

• If you’re solo or an NFP that’s a fairly small cost to bear for the pain saved

• If you’re bigger than solo, that could be a decent cost, still well worth it but here’s a quick hack if you’re not sure yet:

  1. Get a new domain

  2. Get a new google workspace with one generic user.

  3. Upgrade that one.

  4. Create the shared drive there and share it back to your other domain.

  5. That’s what we’re doing in Optimi, for now (balancing getting the right tools vs not spending too much)

2. Research the PARA methodology.

It’s a super simple method for organising your folders (Via Tiago Forte):

Projects

Areas

Resources

Archives

Here’s our version.

All of our storage is beneath those 4 folders. The whole team accesses it via 1 shared group.

3. Mindset shift.

Your drive should be more like a hallway cupboard, not a kitchen pantry. You store stuff there that you don’t need every day and which you need to collaborate on but, anything you need regularly or is important, needs to move closer to where you’re working.

• Look in to collaborative workspaces like Notion and Coda

• These tools are your “kitchen pantry”

• This reduces the pressure on our shared drive to be everything to everyone.

• Then you don’t need to worry about trying to force people to use it “right”.

These are 3 things we’ve done ourselves to reduce wasting time and power up our team.

Results.

• Less time in our drive in general

• When we are there, it’s much more intuitive to navigate

• We spend less time thinking where to put something

• On and offboarding folks is far simpler and less frustrating