A while ago I wrote about how Dropbox can be a tool to organize your life. One of the secondary benefits of Dropbox is that you can share folders with other people to exchange files in a transparent way.
The problem is that if you share Dropbox folders with several people, you can easily lose control of the situation.
Stu Maschwitz makes a comparison between sharing Dropbox folders and having roommates: when you have only one roommate, is easy to know who left the dirty dishes. But when you add a third one, maintenance and finding who’s to blame becomes complicated.
Hence, Stu wrote the three rules of happiness for Dropbox:
- Use a non-stupid name for the shared folder. Don’t place the name of the person with whom you are sharing it with, put also your name, so that the other person knows where the files are coming from. Example: John and Peter, Ashley and John, etc.
- Use a system within your folder: Create subfolders, name those folders with a date, or the project name.
- Do the dishes. Delete unnecessary files after using them. Eventhough is a drive in the cloud, Dropbox files occupy space in other people’s hard drives.
