(Copying this text from this post as it’s very relevant here.)
I’m just playing with this myself in the context of the ‘creative’ or ‘freelancer’ pattern that’s mentioned in these same threads.
What seems to work is a strategy where you expand the ‘middle’ of your system. So if you’ve usually got:
Areas | Categories | IDs
10x | 10x per | 100x per
…what I think is good is to keep that first level, areas. Don’t mess with them: stick to 10, stick with the naming scheme.
But then categories is where it falls apart. Now we’re talking customers or projects or jobs or whatever, and you need more than 10. So in the scheme I’m trying out, here’s what I’ve got.
I’ve gone with 90000–99999 as my range in the middle, giving me 10,000 possible creative outputs. 1,000 felt a bit risky; 100,000 is absurd.
Below that, I’ve gone with a simple XX <name> scheme. Crucially, these are templated: every folder will look the same.
I literally just made this up this morning (after thinking about it for months), so it’s a work-in-progress. So far, I really like it.