How to Organize Your Documents Effectively

Keeping track of your files is, of course, a very important thing to do. There's not much point in making the files in the first place if you can't find them when you need them. Make sure you understand the way your computer expects you to organize your documents and then work within those parameters as much as you can. Soon you'll realize that things are where both you and your computer expect them to be, and keeping track of your important files won't be a chore any more.

Whether you use Windows or a Mac, you'll have a place already set up for storing your documents. This is called, sensibly enough, My Documents, or, for Mac users, just Documents, and it is easily found in the navigation panel on the left of Explorer or Finder windows. In here, make folders according to your organizational needs. For example, you could make one called "House" and keep all house related items in there, adding subfolders as needed. If you do a lot of work on your computer, you could make a separate folder for each project, or one for each client with further folders in there for the relevant projects.

The My Documents or Documents folder is the most important place for storing most things, but the My Pictures or Pictures folder, although more specialist than the general documents folder is where your computer expects you to store scans and digital photos that aren't filed in other ways. The same goes for the My Music or Music folder; this is where iTunes will keep your tunes as you digitize your CD collection or buy songs online. In Windows these are both found within the My Documents folder, but on the Mac these are next to it in the user's Home folder.

The worst thing you can do is to fall into the habit of saving everything to your Desktop. It is fine for a small number of items, especially if you clear it up regularly but if left unchecked this will quickly get crowded and hard to sift through.

Naming conventions are a particularly important thing to consider, both for files and for folders. Don't be afraid to be complete; you shouldn't condense a name down into a handful of characters if that won't help you know what the item is at some point in the future. On the flip side, don't try to fit in a miniature essay about the file or folder. It may help when searching for items, but in most views you won't actually see all that much of a long file name.

When choosing a name for a file, consider who and what it is for. If you'll end up with files called "background" in various different folders, perhaps using a more descriptive name, for example "Smith 2007 calendar project-background photo for January layout" would be much more helpful if you need to sort through files in a hurry. However, this isn't so necessary if the folders the files are in are given descriptive names as well. In this case you could name the outermost folder "Smith 2007 calendar project," make one inside called "January layout" and call the file in there simply "Background photo."

The only real fly in the ointment comes when making files for use online. Space characters in file and folder names are a bad idea on the Internet, and long, sentence like names are best avoided too. Replacing spaces with underscores gives a Web safe simulation, so use those instead.