Fully built - now tame the chaos!

As organizational support during the construction, I plan with Trello.com
It allows you to organize perfectly and keep an overview.

I try to get as much as possible digitally and store it in my cloud.
I still throw paper unsorted into a folder.

Long-term appointments in the digital calendar.

The problem with digital storage is not the location. You can easily shuffle the data back and forth. Much more important is the format! Who can say for sure that PDF will still be the standard document format in 20 years? We have a mixed operation. Everything we receive in paper form, I already file properly. I hate it when I have to search for documents for a long time. Everything I need regularly and have to send, I have on the drive.

I am rather old school that way. Everything nicely in folders and put away. I sometimes needed to look something up after the construction phase. Additionally, you can scan it and upload it to the cloud. But I would be a scaredy-cat that it would get lost. What I don't see, I quickly forget.

I scanned everything and uploaded it to Google Drive.

Did you destroy the originals afterwards? Does that also apply to notary and loan agreements (if available)? What about manuals (in which the craftsman later places a stamp during maintenance)?

And is there a sophisticated folder structure on Google Drive or is everything stored in one folder?

Whether "paper" or "digital" is, IMHO, initially irrelevant when it comes to organization. In both cases, you have to think about it. Either pile everything chronologically with the newest document always on top... or into some kind of structure.

Let me say something as someone experienced in administration. Paper. Not digital. There are retention periods for invoices. There is the need to still have plans, static calculations, permits, etc. even in fifty years. Will there still be CDs then? Will there still be USB sticks? Cloud drives? Do you want to rely on Google for 50 years? Paper is patient after all. Durable. We still have registers from the 16th century in the archive. You have to handle them carefully, of course, but the writing is still legible.

I would now claim that a digital document is more patient than paper! By the way, one does not necessarily exclude the other: During the construction phase, I always scanned everything directly, which was occasionally very helpful on site at the construction or during planning meetings. The scanned documents were then structured and filed in (now) two folders, and that was that.

Who can say for sure that in 20 years PDF will still be the document format of choice?

And that coming from someone who works in IT :rolleyes: