I had a major “light bulb” moment this week.  (You know how in the cartoons, a light bulb goes on over someone’s head?)  I have several areas of my computer that I think of as “working” files, where the folders contain to-do’s, projects in progress, etc.  Let me give you a couple of examples.

I have two homeschooling folders.  One is a “reference” folder, and it contains all the worksheets and ebooks and articles and such that I’ve collected over the years and want to have on hand to reference.  The other is a “current” folder, and it contains the things we need for this specific school year.

Another folder on my computer is a “to print” folder.  I store things in there when I have a lot of things that need to be printed and either I’m currently out of ink/waiting on more, there’s a lot to print and I want to get extra ink first, or I plan to send something out to a commercial printer as one bulk order.

But there’s a problem…

The problem is, I can never remember afterward whether I copied the items to those folders (and can therefore delete them when I’m finished using/printing them), or if I moved the items to those folders (and therefore need to move them back to their archives when I’m done with them).  Usually I copy them, but if I’m not certain, I have to waste time checking.  Also, it can take up a lot of space to store a lot of things that way!

And there’s a solution…

Perhaps this was already obvious to everyone else, but it just occurred to me this week that I can use shortcuts in these folders, rather than copying or moving the originals.  The shortcuts (but not the actual files) can be deleted when I’m done with them, and since a shortcut clearly indicates it’s a shortcut, I’ll know I’m not deleting the original file.

How to Use a Shortcut

You might have read that and thought, “well, duh” — either because it had already occurred to you or because, like me, once you had heard it, it seemed so obvious you wondered why it hadn’t already occurred to you.  But maybe you thought, “huh?” and wonder how to make this work, so let me walk you through the “to print” example.

Important note: I’m using a Windows computer.  Mac seems to have a similar mechanism, called an “alias,” rather than a shortcut, but I’m not Mac-savvy, so I can’t explain how to work with it.

First you need to create the shortcut.  Right-click on the file you want the shortcut to go to, and select “Create shortcut.”  (It’s near the bottom of the menu that pops up.)  A new “file” should appear in the same folder, named Original Filename – Shortcut.

Now you want to move that shortcut to the “working” folder.  There are a couple different ways you can do that.  If you have both folders open in separate windows, you can drag-and-drop the shortcut from one folder to another.  Left-click the shortcut, then, while still holding down the mouse button, drag the file over to the other folder.  Let go of the mouse button to “drop” the shortcut.

I usually cut and paste, because keyboard shortcuts make that easy.  Select the shortcut.  Now hold the Ctrl key and hit the X at the same time.  (Ctrl-X).  This will “cut.”  Then place the mouse cursor in the destination folder and Ctrl-V to paste.  (If you ever want to copy, instead of cut, Ctrl-C does that.  But you don’t need that for our purposes today.)

So now our destination folder looks like this:

Double-clicking the shortcut will open the file just like double-clicking the original file would.  (If you send it to an outside printer, though, you’ll need to email/upload them the actual file, not the shortcut.)  When you’re done printing the document, or at the end of the school year when you’re done actively using the file, etc., you can simply delete the shortcut.  Now the folder is clear, and the original file is unchanged.