What I wished I knew about filenames fifteen years ago

When I began writing, I've wasted hundreds of hours of time, and lost thousands of dollars of income, by not having a consistent system for file names and locations. I often had to recreate illustrations from memory (or from looking at illustrations in a published book).

Now, I have a simple way of keeping track of each element of each chapter of each book. I start with a folder named Writing, which is divided into Articles, Books, E-books, On-line, and Audios. Each category, each publication and book has its own folder. Within these folders, there are separate folders for each article or each book.

Within the Articles and Publication folders, each article has its own folder. Everything associated with the article--phone calls, e-mails, illustrations, text, Mind Maps, etc.--are kept together in this folder. The same is true for each topic written for online sources.

Within the Books folder, there is a separate folder for each book title. Each title folder has separate folders for each chapter, in addition to separate folders for "correspondence," "table of contents," "front matter," "back matter," etc.

More important, everything associated with each chapter goes into a single folder, illustrations and text, all drafts, etc. I used to store illustrations in a separate folder, but this was a disaster, as my books are filled with illustrations, and when a chapter was moved from one location to another in the book, it was extremely hard to locate the illustrations.

Sounds obsessive, but take it from me: a consistent file naming and location system can save the day.