How to to organize files

Organizing digital files can take over your life if you let it, so start by getting specific about what you want to accomplish. The office manager will start by spending one Friday afternoon on this, followed by an hour or so each week. Talk to the leadership team at your organization so you understand their priorities. If you have time, get input from everyone.

Here are a few questions to start with:. Organize digital files by name, date, project, or department. The best way to organize files on a computer will vary based on your organization and its needs. Decide whether it makes sense to organize files by name, date, project, or department.

After that, shared drive folder structure best practice is to start with your broadest categories for your main folders, and then get more specific with subfolders. Pros: Names are less ambiguous than other categories, such as industry or product type. Cons: It can be confusing if the client or company changes their name. It can be difficult to remember when you worked on a certain project at a glance.

Best for: Organizations with large amounts of files tied to time periods, like a financial services business. Best for: Organizations with lots of cross-departmental collaboration—for example, a project manager, writer, and graphic designer work together on every project. Cons: It can be hard to find related projects unless you include that in the file naming structure. Pros: Each team knows where to find their files, so searching is faster.

Cons: When departments do collaborate, it can be confusing deciding where to save files. Ideally, your file names should be detailed enough that you know exactly what they are at a glance. Start with the broadest category at the beginning of the file name, like the year or department, and then get more specific. Whatever you decide, just be consistent. Work together with features like chat, file sharing, and video calling.

Establish a system for version control. Another option is to establish a clear order of file name endings and ask the whole organization to stick to it. This is useful if you want a separate file to mark each stage of a process, but it does lead to more files. Give the client a time limit on revisions, if possible, to avoid a never-ending revision cycle. There are several ways to organize images, such as by year, event, project, or department.

To create shortcuts in Windows 10, you have two main options:. Whether you use a Mac or Windows computer, you can easily set up shortcuts so you or your relatives can access any file quickly.

Organizing photos is a fun part of uncluttering your digital files. During the process, you can go through and relive all the happy adventures and life events that bring back joyful memories. Protecting and organizing these kinds of photos is important. To protect your digital photos and create a system that is easy to access, you must first choose the appropriate storage system.

An appropriate storage system will support large quantities of photos and serve as a digital backup as well. You may choose to utilize more than one of the following options to reduce the risk of losing files. The main benefit of an external hard drive is its massive storage capacity. In addition to organizing files and folders neatly, an external hard drive functions as a backup to your computer. Most external hard drives today are pocket-sized and affordable.

Depending on the number of files that you want to store, you may want an option as large as a 4 Terabyte TB external hard drive. Not only can you backup your valuable files to your external hard drive, but given its compact size, you may carry it with you when you need to and upload on the go. An external drive allows you to keep all of your photos uploaded and stored for quick access in one location.

Cloud services are a great option to store and organize your photos. The main providers of cloud storage services are Google, Dropbox, and iCloud. If you have an email account, you might already be using one of these. By turning on automatic upload from your phone or computer, it makes the process of storing your files in the cloud quick and easy. All three popular storage providers offer free storage limits for each account you set up with them:.

There are many benefits to utilizing cloud storage. For instance, you and anyone with the appropriate login information can access your files from any device, anywhere, as long as the internet is accessible. Some people backup their files on both external hard drives and a cloud service. Given the current threats in cybersecurity, having both systems assures your photos and documents are safe.

To help your relatives avoid having to go through all your pictures to find the one or two that they need, name files appropriately for ease of access. For fast organization, name your photos and place them in appropriate folders as you take them and upload them from your phone. Then, spend time each week to go through old files and rename those without clear file names.

You may want to name according to date, event, or the name of the person or place in the picture. When you have more time available, you may also add tags to your photos. These tags will make finding specific people or places in a group of photos much easier. A survey conducted by the International Data Corporation IDC found that office workers waste approximately two hours each week trying to locate digital documents! Although it might not be noticeable, the time we spend looking for digital files adds up and can reach significant numbers of overtime.

Taking the time to organize your digital files for work or school has a serious potential to boost your productivity. During school or university, we tend to accumulate myriads of documents from homework and class presentations to projects, educational videos, recommendations, and research. To stay on top of your school material and work, you need to sort out your digital files.

This could save you precious time and help you locate key information much faster. Here are a few steps to follow. As mentioned before, the general rule is to organize documents from general to specific. You can use something like the following arrangement for school or university. Similarly, identify the main categories of your work documents and arrange them accordingly.

A business folder might look something like this:. Take advantage of digital note-taking tools. Instead of writing your notes in a brand new Word document and trying to organize each new document, utilize a note-taking app like Evernote. Note-taking applications have a default structure that keeps your files sorted and organized. Also, since your files are on the cloud, you have access to your notes from any device anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection and the application installed.

There was the time my mom asked for a vacation photo that neither of us remembered the specific date of. The time … you get the picture. If you, too, have files scattered across your hard drive or in the cloud, I hope some of these tips will help you. Reorganizing your digital files could take an afternoon or a week, depending on how many folders and files you have to sift through.

I recommend doing this in sprints. Focus on one category of files at a time, such as your work documents or your photos. Before you start attacking your files, take stock of what you have to organize, and visualize what an organized file system looks like to you. Think of the top-level folder as a drawer in a file cabinet. You might have one drawer for work, one for household, one for side projects.

Then for individual files, where would you put them so you can quickly pull out a folder to retrieve them? Below those I have subfolders that get more specific by project.

The best way to organize your documents may look different than mine, but the goal is to not have any stray files. They should all be in folders. Think again about the file-cabinet analogy.