How to Streamline Your Digital Ecosystem and Make Workdays Easier Emphasizing efficiency in virtual workspaces needs to go beyond tidying up a desktop, and embrace both intuitive data systems and the right collaboration tools.

I vividly remember when Microsoft rolled out Windows 95. Designed to actually look like a desktop, with icons for the Recycle Bin, Briefcase, Inbox and other functions, it felt revolutionary, a boon for productivity as well as operations and logistics, and above all, user-friendly. And that innovation was market-proven: Microsoft product designer at the time, Juliette Weiss, noted in a 2017 article for Medium, "It was the most heavily user-tested product in [the company's] history."

In those days, it made sense to treat a computer workspace more or less like your home or office desktop — to regularly clean and organize it just as you would its physical facsimile. But today, with cloud computing and an endless number of automated tools and apps, the digital/physical workspace analogy doesn't quite hold up. Organizing your 21st-century ecosystem isn't just a matter of implementing a smart filing system, but about choosing the right tools and building intuitive systems, then continually refining and updating them. Harvard Business Review summed it up well in an article published more than a decade ago: "Our job today and tomorrow," it read in part, "isn't to organize ourselves better; it's to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs."

At Jotform, my team and I rely on a multitude of tools and platforms for personal work and collaboration and streamlining them has helped us to reduce friction, increase output and both grow and scale without a dime of outside funding.

Here are some of the strategies that have worked for us.

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Lean on the cloud

Let's start with the basics. Cloud computing, as readers likely know, offers a range of services like storage, databases and networking that all live virtually (aka the cloud), rather than on a computer or device. If you use products like Google Drive, Dropbox or even Netflix, then you're already familiar with the concept. Cloud computing offers a secure, cost-effective and flexible alternative to housing the same services and corresponding data locally, where storage, security and bandwidth problems can pose headaches.

With computing tools and data that live in a virtual space, teams can stay on the same page. At Jotform, for example, our designers have migrated their work from what we considered more complicated and data-intensive Photoshop to a more agile tool, Figma, which allowed for smoother collaboration. To give another example: Consider the process of editing in Microsoft Word versus using Google's writing tool. The former often entails saving multiple documents, sending attachments and that nagging feeling that you might not be working with the most current version. With Google's word processing option, multiple people can work simultaneously, and changes are automatically saved (including tracked edits and the ability to view previous versions), allowing for real-time collaboration.

Better yet, platforms and services utilizing the cloud are updated without any effort on your part. Most also connect with other cloud-based products, a task that's much more complicated using software that's downloaded to your computer. Such services are available 24/7/365.

I'm always beating the drum for automation, and when you integrate automated tools into the cloud, they can work for you even when you're not in front of the computer. For example, there's the ability to automatically back up data onto cloud storage with no manual work on your part. Just set it and forget it, and never worry about losing valuable information to in-house crashes.

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Build intuitive systems

Regardless of whether you're using the cloud or standard drive storage (I recommend picking one and sticking with it), it's important to implement systems to ensure that you can quickly and easily access files.

First, make a plan. Identify the most important realms of your digital ecosystem. Where do you tend to work throughout the day? How do you share messages, feedback and documents with team members? Where are your pain points? If you're a visual thinker, you may want to sketch this out. Grab a pen and paper (or your favorite drawing app) and outline an ideal system.

Then, place the things you access most frequently — whether projects, chats or other documents — at the top or forefront of your folder or platform, then institute naming rules. For example, document or project titles must have keywords, dates and version numbers. I can't offer a one-size-fits-all rule here, because it depends on how your team works and the nature of each project, but the idea is to choose naming conventions that make sense given how your work unfolds, then share those rules with teams so everyone can easily search, find and share.

Related: How Small And Medium Businesses Can Save Money and Increase Productivity With The Cloud

Keep a steady eye on innovation

Whether you're working on applications or internal systems, iteration — the process of continually testing and improving — is vital. Over time, tools and technologies might start to get sluggish. And sometimes, even if nothing's amiss in their design or implementation, the issue can lie with the essential technology itself.

So, to keep everything running smoothly, it's important to stay on top of the latest products. Newer and better solutions emerge all the time, and I make it a point to review the product landscape every few months, including reading reviews on sites like G2. In the process, I've found that even seemingly modest improvements to tools can make huge differences in terms of time and energy.

You may be wondering, then, whether it's time to update yours. I'd at least recommend considering it when any of the following occurs:

• A task or process has changed. Big shifts in the nature of work or its flow might require a new solution.

• The solution is no longer supported. If the developer isn't improving a product or releasing regular updates, that's a red flag.

• Workflow is getting buggy. Maybe a tool suddenly fails to send automated emails or otherwise crashes at a specific step. Sudden snags can be a sign that something's wrong under the hood.

• Costs are increasing.

• There are integration issues.

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In streamlining your business's digital space and process, the key is finding the best tools to minimize manual work (and headaches) on your part. And, of course, regular upkeep. In the end, it's all about making more time and saving mental energy for the big stuff — meaningful work that no tool or system can do for you.