Best practices for archiving Freehand and keeping uncluttered

When should I archive my freehands?

It is important to make it easy for your team to find the freehands they need to maintain productivity and minimize duplicity. Yet, it is very easy to find yourself overwhelmed by hundreds of freehands! Especially if you have an admin or manager role.

There are many ways to reduce the clutter and provide a structure for your freehands. For example, leveraging groups and spaces allows you to set up a 'folder' structure that makes sense to your users.

Governance

One of the best ways to keep Freehand organized is to set up governance around how your organization stores, manages, and organizes freehands.

As part of your governance model, you'll document practices such as:

Naming conventions for documents
Naming conventions for spaces and groups
When to use a group vs a space
How to create templates
Format for space overview
Rules for archiving freehands

In this post, we're going to focus on discussing archive rules to help reduce the number of active freehands you have.

Principles around archiving

There are no hard-and-fast rules for archiving freehands, but adhering to these principles is a good starting point:

Any document that has not been viewed in the last 12 months*
Any document that is part of a project that has completed in the last 3 months
Any 'static' documents not edited or viewed in the last 1 month (that is a process, onboarding document, or business workflow)
Personal documents you haven't edited or viewed in the last 1 month

*Department-specific rules

Depending on the department or role, you may also want to set some specific rules. For example, you may choose to keep any wireframes or design documents for at least 12 months after a project ends before archiving. However, you many want to archive sprint planning documents immediately after a project ends.

Work with department heads to understand requirements and needs while you devise your governance plan.

Organization-specific rules

Take into account any organization requirements. For example, documents with sensitive data may need to be archived after a certain period of time.

TIP: Use the 'sort' feature to show the least accessed or edited freehands.

Document your archiving rules

Make sure you document your governance model, leverage champions, or set up guilds to ensure the model is being adopted across your organization.

You man want to add it as part of your training.

How do I archive freehands

Read Archive, restore, transfer, and delete documents to learn how to archive.

Don't worry! You can also unarchive documents if you need them at a later date 😉

Discussion topic: What archiving rules do you have in place?

Bob Mann-Francis

Community moderator

June 26, 2023 14:00

Hi all,
This is an interesting topic, and I've been chatting to a few different people about this recently. We spoke more about the governance of projects, rather than individual documents. So when someone on the team comes into a project's space, they can see the documents relevant to the work in hand, as well as the background behind decisions made. On a personal level, I use sections in spaces to provide way-finding guidance to the areas of work as well as indicate when it was used/created, e.g. "Kickoff - May23" / Q1-FY22 working sessions / v2.4 release. I also remove documents from sections when they are no longer needed, or push them down the sidebar to a deprecated section.

On a group-folder level, I look after my sidebar, keeping active groups there and removing others. This helps me on a personal level as opposed to a team level without archiving anything.

As far as naming convention on Groups/Spaces, I'll leave that to someone else to chime in. The only pointer I've heard which helped our team was keeping the "detail naming" on the left and the higher-level on the right. An example may be 'Brainstorm - Alpha Project'. This means when you have them in a space sidebar, you can see the detail with longer document names.

Hannah Koh

June 26, 2023 15:09
Edited

^^ Couldn't agree more Bob! I love using sections to create more guidance within a Space and removing documents from sections when they're outdated or no longer relevant!! I also do the same for my Groups and remove them from my sidebar when I know I don't need to consistently access them as part of my week to week work.

Regarding naming convention for Groups/Spaces, I try to keep things specific especially on the Group level. Keep in mind Group names cannot be duplicated but Space names can be, so it's always helpful to use more specific Group names and then on the Space level you can be more generic if applicable.

Kate Fisher

June 26, 2023 15:38

Speaking of spaces ⬡ -- I like to name mine starting with a number. Keeps everything scannable and organized!