If you’re anything like I used to be (and still am to an extent), If I had a file and it needed to be saved it was going in ‘My Documents’ or at work my ‘G Drive’. It made sense I mean it was my document it seemed like a perfectly sensible place for it to go… little did I realize that ‘My documents’ soon became ‘My Nightmare’ Even worse was when ‘My Documents’ got so out of control I just started saving to the desktop. I remember thinking ‘I’ll surely see it there’… It didn’t take long for my background image of the junior cricket team I coach to disappear along with any ideas I might have had of where anything was on my computer.  It got so bad that I thought I had developed early onset Alzheimer’s! I could have sworn I’d created a document at some point I just could not for the life of me find it in ‘My Documents’. Sound familiar?

I thought that this organisation affliction may affect more than just me so here are a few tips on getting organised tech-style.

First of all if you are organising your work computer it’s probably your Company drive that needs some work usually named something like ‘G:’ or ‘F:’. It is also worth mentioning that files saved to the server (e.g. your company drive, G: etc.) will automatically be protected (backed up), if you are however simply saving to your ‘My Documents’ folder or Desktop then your documents aren’t necessarily backed up. Just think about what that means for a second. If you computer crashes, or perhaps you leave your laptop in a taxi – your documents are gone, and there won’t be much that can be done to recover them. Scary thought, huh?

Now let’s get to organising… to start, DELETE everything you don’t need. Give your PC a good solid clean out.  If you remove all superfluous files at the start it will make every other step a lot easier.

 Now saving everything to your Company drive folder isn’t a bad thing (in fact it’s generally encouraged); you just need to have neatly organised sub-folders within. Below are a few tips for devising a system that makes sense.

• A good way to think about your computer filing system is to start broadly and narrow down from there, clicking on a few subfolders will be far less irritating than not even knowing where to start.
• Keep it simple – Use as short a naming scheme as possible, especially for folders. Consider the broad areas in which you work in and name folders accordingly. It may be for example; ‘Clients’, ‘Marketing’ and ‘Sales’. You can get a little more detailed when naming a specific document.
• Adopt a naming system that you use for all your documents, make sure that it is something that can be sorted easily i.e. by date or client name etc.  Here at Grassroots IT our main focus is on our clients, this means we deal with multiple clients daily so the system that I have adopted looks like this “clientname_date_description”, also I use the United States date format so that it is sorts in order of creation in my folders.
• Try to get a naming scheme to be implemented across the board in your workplace, if this is not possible ensure you re-name any files you save that are emailed to you to fit in with your system.
• Avoid excessively large folders, if you have a great need for a large folder e.g. you have a thousand clients a good way to make this folder manageable is to create folders to sort them alphabetically i.e. have ‘A_Clients’, ‘B_Clients’ folders etc.
• Avoid having a Miscellaneous folder or maniacally saving to your desktop, if it’s important enough to save than take the extra 10-30 seconds and file it properly it could save you ample time and heart-ache in the future. Also this will help to avoid saving those files that really don’t need to be kept.
• Last but not least ALWAYS BACK UP if you’re backing up all your files regularly AND they’re organized you will always have what you need at your fingertips. remember this is done automatically if you’re saving to your server.

Try applying these simple tips and any others that work for you to your work or home computers, the same can also apply for your email inbox so you can efficiently get through your days without the unnecessary stress of a messy ‘My Documents’ or Company drive.