[From Wrike] The Art of Naming Conventions ๐ก
Stephanie Westbrook
No matter who you are, if you're working in Wrike, or let's be honest if you're working on a computer, it's important to understand naming conventions. Sure, search is always getting better, but it's about so much more than that.ย
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Why use naming conventions?
- Search - if you know what you're looking for it's going to be easier to find. No matter how great search is.ย
- Clarity - clear titles help your team (and people not on your team) understand what they're looking at. Quick and stress-free.
- Saved time - related to the point above, but if things are clear, you spend less time trying to figure out what something is.
Strategy 1: Numbersย
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Wrike sorts a lot of things alphanumerically - which means that using numbers inย Folder titles can help add structure to the Folder tree and to tasks.ย
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A great basic approach is:
- 01-Folder name
- 02-Folder name
- 03-Folder name
Strategy 2:ย Shorter is better
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This is my personal favorite.ย People sometimes like to add more detail because they think that will help make things clearer, but more is not always better. Sticking toย keywordsย helps make task titles easily digestible and makes things easier to read on Dashboards and Reports.ย
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Use
- Create Content - Gen X
- Design - Cats Blog Webpage
Don't Use
- Create gen x content for our new community forumsย
- Work with marketing to design a new landing page for our blog on cats
You get the picture. Essentially, write task titles in the same way you'd search on Google i.e. you don't need to use full sentences.ย ย
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Strategy 3: Verbsย
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Ifย your main objective is to share what needs to be done, then action words are fantastic. It's similar to strategy 2 above, but this is an easy strategy to teachย as people areย working on and creating their own tasks.ย
- Write-
- Design-
- Draft-
- Review-
If you've tested this out, or if you use something else that works for your team, let us know in the comments below!
We use the format of action verb + project name + MM.DD.YY...do you think it would be better to do MM.DD.YY + action verb + project name?ย
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Any tips?
This is great. Naming conventions has been one of my biggest soapboxes over the years as it seems to be overlooked, under developed, and under enforced. I have been following some of the ideas above for years and seems to work best for me.
Cool, thanks for sharing, Dave Wrightย ๐ If you ever decide to let the Community know how you're doing that in more detail, that would be awesome!ย
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Hi Wrikesters,
We have implemented a naming convention for our 'parent/top' level projects and a suggested format for our 'sub' projects.ย
We use 'Org Unit Abbreviation'-'Project category abbreviation'-Descriptive, concise project nameย for parent projects, and [short parent project name] Sub-project name for our subprojects.
We used to also add the short project name as a task prefix but are rethinking this now as when you're looking at tasks in dashboards and reports, if the prefix is not very short you don't actually see the task name (you only see the prefix).
Do other users/teams have ideas and suggestions around sub-project and task names/prefixes?ย
Hi Liam McGuigan, welcome to the Community! ๐คย
When you're using dashboards, you can enable the widgets to show parent folders or projects so that it's immediately visible to which project the task belongs:
In reports, it's possible to structure tasks hierarchically so that it's visible to with project they belong (it can also be seen if you enable the project or folder field):
Can this help?ย
Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover
Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover