These tips for organizing electronic files will help you turn a cluttered computer into a work of organizational art. If you’re currently suffering from a messy computer don’t feel bad because you’re certainly not alone. The problem is that no one took the time to show any of us how to set things up in the beginning. You’ll learn how to fix that in a few moments – just keep reading.

First of all, take a moment to think about what kind of files you have on your computer and how you can divide them into simple groups. Some examples of groups like this would be Work Items, Photos, Music, Personal Documents, and School. Your list may be different, but it’s best if you can break your files into as few generic categories as possible. Doing this will set the foundation for a clean and organized computer.

Once you have your list of categories, go ahead and create directories for each category. While widows will always try to get you to save things into the ‘My Documents’ folder there are a few reasons why this isn’t always the best idea and here’s why:

Reasons Why Not to Use the My Documents Folder:

• Not enough categories to store things properly
• Documents are stored in a generic way that may not suit your personal situation
• Difficult to move, sort and back the files in the future.

If Multiple People Use Your Computer

For Families or people with shared computers, a good idea would be to create your own folder first with your name on it and then create the broad categories inside of your named folder. This will make sure that everyone’s documents are nicely separated.

Tips for Naming Folders and Files

If you are saving things that are time sensitive like photos, monthly reports, or invoices, you may want to name your directories with a prefix of the year and month. If you went to Mexico in November of 2008, instead of creating a Mexico folder within your Photos folder, you would create an 0811_Mexico Folder. Notice that the year comes before the month to give us 0811 which means November of 2008. By naming time sensitive files or folders this way you can always sort things alphabetically and very quickly find the time period you are looking for.

You can do the same kind of thing with your files, but if you have proper directories and sub directories set up.

The Best Tips for Organizing Electronic Files

The best thing that you can do is to save your files and folders with meaningful names. When you are in a rush it’s easy to save files with names like “qqq.doc” but when you need to look for the information contained in that file in the future it could be a nightmare to find – especially if you have hundreds or even thousands of improperly named files like this.
The last tip is to take a second when you are saving your files to make sure that you are saving them in the proper folder. The extra second that it takes to complete this step could save you hours down the road when you are trying to locate a file.

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