It occurred to me that we always seem to read about organizing our physical files – bank statements, certificates, tax returns, receipts, but I have never read an article about organizing your desktop and your laptop files.
This is how I organize my virtual desktop:
(I use My Documents mainly for convenience because Windows has links to it everywhere. I originally started out using C:\ as my main folder, but it became a hassle, so *shrug* if you can’t beat it, join it.)
Folders created in My Documents
1. Head Corporation –> [Insert your Company Name Here]
2. Information
3. Music
4. Pictures
5. Videos
6. Programs
7. Miscellanous
8. Current Project
Folder 1: Head Corporation
Administrative: HR Documents such as the ones I have to submit on a regular basis like Learning Plans or other such project and business documents, Payroll statements, Company statements, notice of changes, anything important I’d like to keep.
Project Archive: This is where all of my projects that have finished go. I put the Current Project I am working on at the moment in the main My Documents root folder because I need to access it on a regular basis.
Company Events: Not training related. This is where they hand out powerpoints that you think are useful, that hold contact names of people in your department, or other such things.
Training: I go on a lot of courses and training seminars, and they tend to hand you a large zip file with documents that you’re fairly sure you’ll require in the future for your industry or job, but instead of rooting through my General Notes folder, it goes in here, sorted by name of the course/seminar and by date. And if there are hardcopies, I scan them in, and discard.
General Notes: I work with in a specialized industry, so I tend to write lots of notes to myself about acronyms, IT phrases, and things I have to remember but cannot keep stored in my brain because there are a bajillion of them. I have them organized by project like: Project Name_Notes, or by date, or just by whatever the subject matter is.
Travel: This is where I throw all of my airplane e-tickets, my scanned in receipts (if there’s a scanner available on site), my notes about confirmation numbers at hotels and for train tickets, basically anything to do with travelling. It is organized by trip name, description, city and date.
The main section of this folder holds current reference documents I need for the current project I’m on. Kind of like a library. I don’t put them in my Current Project Folder #7 because that’s meant for just client-specific documents. This way, I don’t get clutter from mixing my company and personal reference documents with actual deliverable client-specific documents.
Folder 2: Information
This one holds my personal information. I have it blank right now, with no folders, but anything that has to do with things I see on the web and would like to remember, but don’t have time to read over carefully, I copy and paste into a Word document, and throw it into here, with a short label. When I have more time, I go back, label it properly with something with a header label.
Here’s a sampling of examples:
Household_Tips on using WD40.doc
Household_Tips on using Vinegar.doc
Receipts_Moving_Truck Rental_1 Sep 2007.doc
Receipts_Moving_Gas_1 Sep 2007.doc
Receipts_Car Rental_Hertz_Washington_3 Sep 2007.doc
Receipts_Car Rental_Hertz_New York_7 Sep 2007.doc
Get the point? This way, even if all of my documents are in one big fat folder, they’re sorted first by their general category of Household, Receipts, Blogs, Bank, anything you want to sort your info by that makes sense to you; then by their subheading of the second category, then a description of what it is.
In the description, I like to make it unique, with at least a company name, city if applicable and date. Each file has to have a unique identifier that will immediately jog my memory of what it is without having to open it.
Folders 3, 4, 5 and 6: Music/Pictures/Video/Programs
Pretty self-explanatory. I don’t throw them all together because I like to select large batches of videos at time to queue up and play, and sometimes Programs or Pictures get in the way of my mass selection. As for programs, with Paint.net for example, it’s handy to have the downloaded .exe (Executable file) ready and available when you need it.
Folder 7: Miscellanous
This is where I throw anything that doesn’t fit in ANY of the folders above. I use this as my Miscellanous folder, my Temporary folder, anything to hold files that I don’t plan on keeping or haven’t decided what to do with yet.
If I start collecting a lot of the same type of file, like documents on program coding scripts that I keep using in the same industry but for different clients, I’ll go and create a folder called “Scripts and Coding” under the appropriate header folders.
Folder 8: Current Project
It makes it super easy to access it right from My Documents without having to sift through everything. After the project has finished, I throw it into my Project Archive under Head Corporation, and I always know where it is.
Don’t over segregate it
The key is to keep it short. Don’t go any deeper than 3 to 4 subfolders if you can (My Documents > Folder 1 > Folder 2) because it’s going to be a bloody headache and you’ll regret that you micro-organized all of your files. The point is to segregate the breadth of information you have, in general categories so that it breaks down the workload of finding what you need. This is supposed to make your life easier, not harder.
Keep up on it
These folders don’t work if you don’t re-organize them to fit what you are currently working on (rename them as time goes on, if you have to!) and I keep very current documents on my USB key, and only after they’re not as current/urgent, do I throw them into my Current Project folder, as a semi-archival way of clearing my USB key, so I can easily access information on there.
Google Desktop it
Another alternative, is to install Google Desktop, which indexes ALL of your files (no matter whether it’s a picture, video, program, word file), and works like Google Search Engine, but with only your personal files on your computer.
So if you remember a particular phrase in a Word document but cannot remember where the heck you read it or kept it, type it into Google Desktop Search, and voila, it pops up your matches/hits for what you typed in.
Web it
Another way to keep ridiculously organized is to shift it all onto the web if you are constantly on different laptops and computers (I’m on 2 computers at any given moment, sometimes 3). That isn’t possible for me and my job however since I cannot surf the web on my client laptop, but for my personal life, I keep everything labelled and archived on Gmail, I keep pictures and other information on a website like Flickr, and instead of Favourites, my favourite blogs are kept in Google Reader (RSS Feed that combines all of the blogs I read into one central location) and my website links are kept to a minimum.
Document Naming Conventions & Version Control
Lastly, if you keep up on a consistent naming of your files, you won’t be scrambling later on to find “test.doc” and wonder if it was the same as “test2.doc“, or “test3.doc” or “1test.doc“, or whether you kept it in “test.xls” not in a “.doc” file….Hmm 
Sound familiar? I admit to quickly saving something as “untitled“, but I always go back, do a quick scan, and rename it to something useful.
Use some sort of version control (v.1.0. as an ending if you change a document several times in a day), and save all of your old versions of the document so you can go back if need be.
- How to back up your Tungsten E2 Data (Addresses, Contacts, etc) on a MacBook
- Cookies & Files, Cookies & Files…
- Go paperless!
- Things to get done this week
- When a 1-page Resume or CV does not make any sense
