In my travels around the Web, I download a lot of stuff: video files, mp3s, pdfs, etc. But in the flow of my normal day, I don’t spend a lot of time organizing this stuff. I tend to dump my files in a documents folder or on my desktop, and it turns into a mess very quickly. Well, I realized today that the same Getting Things Done principles that help keep my real desk uncluttered could be applied to cleaning up my virtual desk.
- Create a “Bucket” folder.
I mentioned I use a documents folder or my desktop, but that’s not good enough. Just create a folder named “Bucket,” and move all your cluttered files into it. - One file type at a time.
Click the top of your file list so that your Bucket is organized by type: so that all the mp3s, jpgs, docs, etc. are lined up together. Start moving through each type one file at a time and either delete it or move it to the proper folder. - File your files.
It’s very tempting to save all your files in My Documents in Windows or on your Desktop in OS X, but that’s not what those places are for. Save your docs, your address book files, your spreadsheets, or your calendar info in your My Documents folder. Save your pictures in My Pictures, your music in My Music, and your videos in My Videos. That’s why those folders exist. - Maintain!
It’s not that hard when you’re downloading something to choose the destination. So if you’re saving a file that you know you want to keep, go ahead and save it to the proper folder from the start. If it’s just something you want to watch or read once, save it to your Bucket folder. Then make some time once a week or once a month to sort it out.
So what’s the point of organizing your computer? External hard drives are cheap, and you can always burn a DVD archive. Well, data storage space isn’t an issue today, but it might be in a couple of years.
On Wired.com today, there’s a story about the amount of digital information we created in the last year. They estimate that all the emails, phone calls, Web pages, and other digital documents composed 161 billion gigabytes (a billion gigabyte is called an exabyte) of data. And they project that our digital data production will jump to 988 exabytes in 2010, but our capacity for storing that data will only have increased to 601 exabytes. While we won’t need to save all of that data (like phone calls), it still raises the question: how much space will we need?
If you get your digital life organized today, you’ll be ahead of the curve should a problem like that ever arise.
