At the time, you are banging your head on your desk in frustration, but you finally find the file you need after opening 10 versions. Mission accomplished, and you move on to the next thing on your checklist. You know what would help in this situation? The use of file naming conventions. You found what you needed, so does it matter? According to the Pareto Principle, aka the 80/20 rule, yes, it does matter: 20% of minor issues can account for 80% of problems.
In a training seminar I attended many years ago, the instructor emphasized a simple but powerful concept. The only reason to file or save a document is to retrieve it later. If retrieval is difficult or impossible, then the filing system isn’t doing its job. A system that hides information instead of surfacing it when needed is, at best, inefficient and, at worst, completely broken. A well-designed file structure eliminates that stress by making it obvious where things belong and intuitive to find them again. Over time, the minutes saved add up to hours reclaimed. Time that can be spent on higher-value work rather than digital archaeology.
Another point to consider with on-the-fly file names is succession planning. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been lost in the quagmire of files I inherited at the start of a new position. You may readily know what NSF_Smith references, but the person following you doesn’t have the same institutional knowledge to know that Smith references ‘John Smith’ and not ‘Wanda Smith’, and that John only submitted one NSF proposal during his brief time in the Biology Department back in 2021. If you have a well-constructed naming convention, even ten years down the road, a successor will be able to know if this is the file that is now needed.
We also have to consider AI. Yes indeed, the names of our files can impact the utility of AI, from the simple use of search tools to broader institutional system integrations. At the 2025 SRAI Annual Meeting, I attended the session Harnessing AI for Research Administration by Sonia Singh and Christopher Crookston, which focused on the enterprise-level use of AI tools. However, the information is applicable to our individual files as well. They shared that “institutions must ensure that data and file systems are organized, connected, and secure. Readiness across data structures, integrations, and formats enables AI to deliver accurate results, support compliance, and unlock efficiency gains.” One point of importance they highlighted is the use of “formats and layouts that allow AI to extract and interpret content.”
We’ve been talking about the “why” of naming conventions, so let’s take a minute to look at the how. There are innumerable ways to organize your files, but here are a few suggestions, along with my rationale for using them. Remember that we are only storing documents to retrieve them, so consider the reasons you need to find files and how you would look for them. These elements should be included in the name of your documents.
Date: I always have the date first in the format of year-month-day. This keeps the default structure in date order. You can use the hyphens or nix them. For our proposal files, the date is the day the file was saved or submitted. Having the full date also lets us find all proposals submitted within a specific date range and makes cleanup easier. Once I have submitted a grant, I delete the earlier versions, though many research administrators prefer to keep all iterations to preserve the history and to be able to reference them for future grant submissions.
Component: What part of the grant is this document? Is it the narrative, the budget justification, a person’s CV, etc.? Having this in the title will make it easier to upload to a submission portal and compile it into a single PDF.
PI Name: I recommend using first and last names to avoid confusion among those with the same name. I use last, first because I was raised on APA formatting. Even if you do not have another Smith or Richard now, you may later. I can quickly pull all proposals by a specific principal investigator (PI).
Funding Agency: Frequently, PIs submit the same or slightly different versions of a proposal to multiple funding agencies. This allows us to distinguish between those submissions. We can also find all of the submissions to a specific funding agency if we are analyzing our submission trends.
Submission Dollar Value: By including the dollar amount in the title, we can search for submissions above or below a benchmark dollar value, which can be a valuable metric. And again, it can help distinguish a specific PI's submissions when the applications have similar titles.=
Proposal Name: We use a brief two- to five-word title for the grant. Usually, the full grant titles are too long to use as document names. However, be sure to include enough information to distinguish similar proposals.
Here are a few examples of optimized file names for my department’s requirements:
2025-10-20 Narrative Smith, Wanda NSF $1,400,000 Metal Organic Molecules
2025-05-13 Budget Justification Jones, Richard IES $900,500 Language Barriers
2026-01-12 CV Williams, Ryan DOE $50,000 Student Outcomes
2026-01-28 Full Submission Bailey, Marissa Children’s Board $465,200 Pre-School Success Measures
OK. I hear you! Yet one more thing to do for each submission. However, back to the 80/20 rule. A small investment of intentional effort on the front end can unlock the majority of our success later. A moment for organizing can prevent unnecessary stress, wasted time, and reactive scrambling down the road. By pausing now to think strategically, we set ourselves up for smoother execution, clearer focus, and better results. In other words, a little preparation is a multiplier. Two minutes today can save 8 tomorrow and adopting that mindset consistently is what ultimately drives meaningful, sustainable progress.