How to Collaborate on Multiple Documents with Multiple People
If you’re working on a group project, it can be hard to keep all your documents organized and accessible. Get-It-Done Guy has a few simple tricks to help you stop wading through shared files aimlessly and get to the business of collaboration.
Electronic files are great! You can have Text Files, Google Doc files, Mac iWork files, Microsoft Office Files, and thousands more. You can have big files, small files, blue files, new files. You can have them on a box. You can have them with a fox. Computers have given us the chance to have files galore.
We can put things in folders where we can use them later. Even better, we can share those folders with other people so they can use the files, too. We can coordinate in ways our ancestors could only dream of…or can we?
File Libraries Grow Over Time
Europa, secret ruler of the Eastern Bloc, has a new batch of world leaders working for her. She got tired of the old ones. They were far too competent. A couple of them actually made decisions that revealed independent thought. That won’t do, so she quietly had them replaced.
In an effort to get her many puppet leaders up to speed, she has given them all access to the World Domination folder that the now-defunct world leaders used for sharing files. It has every single document used to coordinate her dastardly plans, going back years. Every. Single. Document.
They look for files on how to destabilize a democracy, but instead they find the canapé recipe from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal wedding reception. Tasty? Yes. Destabilizing? Only if you have a gluten allergy.
“Election Rigging Schedule Coordination” (you can’t rig all the elections at once, or people will notice). “Preferred money laundering accounts” (lots of Deutsche Bank account numbers). Talking points for the news channels that spread the best propaganda, and so on. Everything they need is somewhere in the folder. Life should be perfect!
But it isn’t. Each world leader starts hunting through the files, but there’s no rhyme or reason. They look for files on how to destabilize a democracy, but instead they find the canapé recipe from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal wedding reception. Tasty? Yes. Destabilizing? Only if you have a gluten allergy.
New People Need Help Finding Everything
Accumulations have an indexing problem. There’s no way for a new person to find stuff. And it’s not just new people. You, a year from now, may also be lost. When you’re in the middle of a project that you’ve been working on for a while, you know where everything is. But once you’ve been away for a bit, it’s easy to lose track.
You remember there’s a file of oligarchs who can help fund your secret hacker army, but you have to hunt through a dozen different files before you find the most current version.
Now that we’re living in the age of the internet, the cloud, and file sharing, however, there’s an easy workaround: use the documents themselves to be your short-term memory. And not just your short-term memory—everyone’s short-term memory.
Use File Links to Embed the Address of Related Files
Have one master file that gives an overview of any given project. Europa can do that. She quickly creates a Google Doc in the World Domination folder, called “World Domination Master Plan.” In that document, she includes a brief description of the project that will help new people get oriented. She mentions election rigging, money laundering, and propaganda, to name a few items on her to-do list.
But just as important, in each area of the document, she includes a link to the documents that someone working on those projects might need. Beneath the paragraph that discusses election rigging, she’ll include a link to the Election Rigging Schedule Coordination spreadsheet.
Gather the Links in One Place
Putting the links to associated documents in each section is great when her new minions are reading the overview. As they read about money laundering, with one little click they can get right to the necessary account numbers Google Sheet. (Who knew that so much of world domination is bureaucratic logistics?)
But later, when they forget to bookmark the link to the account numbers, they may not recall which part of the World Domination Master Plan had the link. So don’t just put your links in the associated section of your document. Also gather up all the links to relevant documents and put them in one place at the very start or very end of the document. Then everyone knows the only document they need to bookmark is World Domination Master Plan. By scrolling to the top or the bottom, they can find the link to any associated document they need.
Put Links in Related Docs, Too
This isn’t just for the Master Plan document. In related documents, you can put a link back to the Master Plan. It will make it super-easy for people to navigate directly to what’s related. The first row of the Money Laundering Account Numbers document has a link back to the Master Plan. After retrieving account numbers, any one of the nefarious World Domination schemers can quickly return to the project overview.
Link back to the Master Plan. It will make it super-easy for people to navigate directly to what’s related.
Make Files Shareable
Europa, however, has a problem. Many of her documents are stored in Google Docs and Google Sheets, so linking to them is pretty darned easy. Some of her files live on her work computer, however, but still need to be linked to her master document.
In today’s world of the cloud, that’s possible!
You can put a file into Dropbox and get a sharing link for it. You can then put that sharing link into your Master Plan document.
You can also use a service like oDrive. It gives you sharing links for anything you store in a cloud service. If you upgrade to their paid plan, you also get zero-knowledge encryption for anything you store in any cloud service. (Zero-knowledge encryption gives you privacy when you’re storing stuff in the cloud. I discussed it in the episode How to Protect Your Digital Files (Part 2).)
If you use a Mac, Pages and Numbers and Keynote all support direct collaboration for files stored in iCloud. You can move a file into iCloud, turn on collaboration for that file, and get a sharing link. That’s the link you add to your Master Plan.
If you use Microsoft Office 2016 or later, you can generate a sharing link for an Office file and add that link to your Master Plan. Microsoft has a long, noble history of giving intelligence agencies access to servers without notifying users. If you care about your privacy, use oDrive’s paid plan to store your files in Microsoft’s cloud rather than storing them directly from Microsoft Office.
Armed with this knowledge (as well as several nuclear arsenals controlled by her puppet heads of state), Europa can rest easy. She’s added all the relevant links to her Master Plan file. Now her new puppets can find the files they need, without having to wade through all the clutter on the shared drive. She, meanwhile, can once again take her attention off the administrative details, and spend her time on the things that really matter. Bwah hah hah hah hah!
I’m Stever Robbins. If you’re an entrepreneur, self-employed or otherwise need to control your own time, Get-it-Done groups help you start finishing what’s important, and develop the habits you need to be hyper-productive. Learn more at SteverRobbins.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Collaboration image courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
