Most of us have spent the majority of our careers in what I’ll call The Age of Microsoft’s Office Suite. We learned how to use Word for creating business documents, PowerPoint to create presentations, and Excel for spreadsheets. The applications were installed on our local desktop computers or laptops. We created an endless stream of business artifacts, organized in complete chaos on our desktops until we needed to present something. And we quickly created folders called Sort, Super Sort, Archive, Junk, or Stuff to clean up the desktop mess.

The artifacts (files) stayed local. We spent little time thinking about file names until we shared them, primarily through email as attachments. This all seemed very normal and quite productive since we could create unlimited artifacts (files), send unlimited number of emails, and generally have nearly unlimited storage on our computers.

For many of us, this is still our approach to work. Create documents or spreadsheets, share them with colleagues, customers, partners via email, and keep making those aptly named folders on our desktops with great names (MegaSort).