How to Organize Your Computer

Some of us learned to organize paperwork. (Some of us still struggle with that!) But few of us learned any skills for organizing digital files. The good news is, there are a couple key concepts that go a long way toward an organized computer.

Use folders and sub-folders.
Have a system.

That’s pretty much it. Let’s talk about those a little more.

Use Folders and Sub-Folders

Some people are in the habit of just dumping everything into “My Documents.” If search is good enough, and that works for you, more power to you. I have a lot of files and would never be able to find anything that way. Instead, files are grouped by topic. You can go as deep as you want/need to with sub-folders, or keep them as general as you need to — whatever works for you.

On my computer, it depends a lot on the topic. With some, I find it very helpful to subdivide and subdivide and subdivide. With other topics, just a single layer or two deep works. Generally, if I would look for it under a more “niche” topic, more child folders are helpful. If I would look for it in a general way, a general folder is enough. (It helps, too, that searches typically search child folders, so you don’t have to look in the deepest child folder, necessarily.)

Let me show you an example. On my computer, I actually have two “umbrella” folders in my documents, called 00-ACTIVE and 00-REFERENCE. For a lot of people, this would be overkill. For me, it helps me separate resource-type materials I downloaded from the internet and want to have when the subject comes up, from those I’m actively working with. You don’t need these if you find that more complicated than it’s worth, but you’ll see this in my screenshots, so I didn’t want to leave you wondering about them.

Okay, so I have two homeschool folders. One is in the “active” area, and includes my lesson plans for the girls, our yearly schedules, etc.

The other one is the one I want to show you as an example. It’s in my reference folder, and holds various activities I want to be able to look at when we’re studying a particular topic. This is an area where I’ve subdivided very deeply, so you can see how my layers branch. (Some things seem to be missing from a computer transfer, so if you wonder why some topics seem to be absent, that’s why.)

Here we have broad school subjects. (My Kids Made This and Raddish are brand names/websites, so those are places I’m gathering materials that came/come from those particular sources.) “General” is study skills, teacher helps, all-purpose notebooking pages, information about different learning styles or teaching methodologies, etc. Let’s dig into the Social Studies folder.

We have a couple general items that cover more than one category, so they stay here, and then it’s further subdivided into Culture, Geography, and History. Now, a couple of those don’t subdivide much further. I think Geography, for example, has World and U.S., and U.S. might have a subfolder or two for specific state studies. But History keeps going.

And again…

Explorers, Middle Ages and Vikings, and Renaissance and Reformation stop here. But Ancient History still keeps going.

Can you see how I take it as logically deep as I need to? “Ancient Egypt” is something we study, as its own focus. It makes sense to have all those files clustered together. But it would be silly of me to subdivide the Middle Ages very far, because we don’t study things like “foods of the Middle Ages,” or “western Wales during the Middle Ages” by themselves. (I’m sure some PhD candidate somewhere does, but we don’t in our homeschool!)

Have a System

When I say “have a system,” I’m not talking about anything complicated. I just mean being consistent about how you use folder names. I can easily find my homeschooling files when I need them because I only have one (parent) folder for collected homeschool materials, and one for our personal homeschooling plans. What if I had a handful of folders, named like this:

Homeschool
2017 Homeschool
Homeschooling
Homeschool-2017
Home School Plans

Can you imagine how quickly I would lose track of where things were? Which folder did I put that in? Is there a homeschool folder yet, or do I need to create one for this new file? (Yikes!) If I can’t find the file I’m looking for here in this folder, does that mean it got misfiled or I don’t have it, or is it just in some other folder I may or may not realize I created?

Especially when the naming conventions are so different (dates before the keywords vs. dates after the keywords), these don’t even end up clustered together in the main documents folder, making them even harder to find and sort out.

When you’re deciding how to name something, think about how it’s going to show up in the alphabetical list of folders. Is “2017” a meaningful idea to find in the list? For most subjects, it really isn’t. (Exceptions are usually within a parent folder.) It’s much more likely that you’re looking for “Homeschool” than for “2017,” so “Homeschool-2017” is a more logical folder name than “2017 Homeschool.” And then when you have several years’ worth of folders, they show up neatly one after the other like this:

Homeschool-2013
Homeschool-2014
Homeschool-2015
Homeschool-2016
Homeschool-2017

That’s much tidier than the confused mess we had in the previous list, right?!

In keeping with the idea of the computer’s alphabetization process, I also usually employ a couple other little tricks. First, if I’m using full dates, I put the year first, then the month, then the day. This way they always sort in date order.

And second, if I have a particularly important folder I want to always show up at the top, I add 00- or 0- or 1- to the beginning to force it to show before the A’s. (If you overuse this strategy, you can still end up with a jumble. But used judiciously, it can be quite handy. I tend to find it more helpful in my “working” folders than my reference folders.)

Bonus Tip: Have an Inbox

Desktops can become a cluttered mess, right? I prefer to keep mine clear of all but the handful of shortcuts I actually use regularly. It’s not an easy place to find things, anyway, if you’re in the habit of saving files there.

But if I try to just always save my files directly to where they belong, I inevitably end up double-clicking by mistake or something, and having no idea what random folder on my computer I just downloaded to. (Maybe that’s just me?) So here’s what I do: I have a single folder on my desktop, called INBOX.

(That isn’t the only thing on my desktop; I just figured you didn’t need to see all the program shortcuts to the left of it.) My email and my browser are set, by default, to save/download everything to this folder. If I’m working on a project and don’t already know exactly where its files are supposed to go, I save them here. Everything that doesn’t already have a designated place goes into the INBOX.

If I’ve recently downloaded something, I know exactly where to find it. If I want an older file, and it isn’t where it “belongs,” I know it’s here. I don’t lose time trying to figure out where something needs to go on the fly if I don’t already know, or searching for things my browser downloaded to the previously-used folder — wherever that might be.

And periodically I just open up two windows and cut/paste the items from the inbox into their permanent homes.

Essentially, I treat these incoming files as though they were pieces of paper coming into my home — toss them in the inbox, and at an appropriate time, process & file them.