Workspaces drown not in bad files but in finished ones — closed projects, past years, shipped versions — all cluttering the space where current work lives, because "archive" was never defined as an action with a trigger. A working archive strategy answers four questions structurally: when does something move (triggers, not judgment calls), where (a parallel dated structure, not a junk room), how is it found (search + a skeleton index, not browsing), and who moves it (the close-out ritual, so archiving happens at natural endings instead of never).
What This Skill Produces
- The triggers — the events that move material to archive automatically: project close, year end, version supersession, person departure
- The destination structure —
_archive/[year]/[original-path]mirroring, so provenance survives the move - The findability layer — search-first retrieval + the one-page archive index for the things search misses
- The close-out ritual — the 20-minute end-of-project checklist where archiving actually happens
Required Inputs
Ask for these if not provided:
- The workspace(s) — drive, project tool, wiki, or all three; each gets the same triggers, platform-appropriate mechanics
- The natural endings — what "closed" looks like here (shipped, signed-off, renewed, year-end); triggers attach to real events the team already recognizes
- The retrieval reality — how often archived material actually gets fetched, and by whom; findability effort scales to real demand, not imagined
- Retention constraints — anything with keep-periods or destruction dates (document-retention-map rules ride along into the archive)
Framework: The Strategy Rules
- Triggers beat judgment: "archive when the project closes / the year ends / v2 ships / the person leaves" — event-attached rules fire; "archive old stuff sometime" never does. Every trigger names its event and its mover.
- Mirror the path, date the layer:
_archive/2026/Clients/Acme/preserves where things lived — provenance is half of future findability, and flat archive dumps ("old-files/") destroy it. The move is a cut-paste of whole folders, never a reorganization-during-archiving (that's how archiving stalls). - Search-first, index-light: archives are retrieved by search (names per filename-convention make this work), plus one skeleton index per year — ten lines: what major things this year's archive holds. Elaborate archive taxonomies serve nobody; the index serves the search-resistant cases.
- Active workspaces show only the living: the payoff metric is the current workspace's size — if this year's project list fits one screen, the strategy is working. Archive isn't storage policy; it's attention policy for the space where work happens.
- The ritual is where it becomes real: project close-out = 20 minutes: final artifacts named per convention → folder moved to the archive mirror → the year-index line written → links in living docs updated. Attached to the existing close process (the retro, the invoice, the handoff), owned by the project's closer — rituals attached to nothing fire like triggers attached to nothing.
Output Format
Archive Strategy: [workspace]The Triggers
| Event | What moves | Who moves it |
|---|
The Destination
[_archive/[year]/[mirrored-path] · whole-folder moves · retention/destruction notes riding along]
Findability
[Search-first note · the year-index skeleton (ten lines) · where the index lives]
The Close-Out Ritual (20 min, attached to [the existing close event])
[Name-final → move → index-line → fix-links — with the owner role named]
Quality Checks
- Every trigger names a real event and a mover
- The archive mirrors original paths under a year layer
- Retrieval is search + skeleton index — no archive taxonomy project
- The ritual is attached to an existing close process with an owner
- The current workspace visibly shrank — the strategy's actual success metric
Anti-Patterns
- Do not archive by mood — triggerless archiving is a euphemism for never
- Do not flatten paths into a dump — provenance is findability
- Do not reorganize while archiving — the move is a move; improving history is a separate (usually skippable) project
- Do not build archive taxonomy — search plus ten index lines outperforms it at 5% of the cost
- Do not let archives exempt themselves from retention rules — destruction dates ride along with the files
Example Trigger Phrases
- "Set up an archiving system."
- "Our workspace is drowning in old projects."
- "Make history findable without cluttering today."