The Most Effective Way of Organizing Your Files and Folders. One of the simplest and most overlooked aspects of being organized is getting your computer files organized. Its something thats easy to take for granted, especially when you forget that most people dont use their computers like us crazy systems people do. Lets look at some good practices for keeping your files and documents neat, in folders and easy searchable and accessible. The idea of organizing files and documents goes back to the good old days of filing cabinets and paper. Hopefully, youre someone who has already made the switch to goingpaperless. The advantage of the original paper based cabinets was that you really had to think about where to put documents so that they could be easily located when they were needed. Hi Joe, I am working on a crystal report where I am calling Stored procedure inside the report and have saved Stored procedure input parameter. The Most Effective Way of Organizing Your Files, Folders and Documents. By Aaron Lynn 54 comments. One of the simplest and most overlooked aspects of being. Crystal Report Compile Exe' title='Crystal Report Compile Exe' />With computers, we have somewhat lost this art form and exchanged it for an all in one search function instead. My personal test for organization is this you should be able to find the majority of your documents without using Spotlight or Windows Search. If you cant, youve got some housecleaning to do. Note Well be talking about folders and directories on your hard disk in this article. You could easily replicate the directory structures into a filing application like Devon. Crystal Report Compile Exe' title='Crystal Report Compile Exe' />Think, or wikinotebook style applications like Evernote and Voodoo. Pad. Well do our best to cover both OS X and Windows in this article. For the most part, the user directory structure is the same as are where you should store your files. The article will however lean more towards the Mac side of things. Quick Summary. Its easy to keep your files and documents organized if you follow just a few simple rules. Dropbox may be one of the greatest inventions ever. There are a number of ways to categorize and organize your personal documents, but heres a simple template. The same goes for your business documents, but there is a logical pattern you can use to divide up your files. A quick look at where your files should and should not go. Some Simple Rules. Lets start with some simple rules for managing your files and folders. Dont put files on the desktop. Your desktop is supposed to be clean and display that gorgeous high resolution wallpaper youve got going on. It should contain your trashrecycle bin, and thats about it. On very rare exceptions youre allowed to put a text file or two on your desktop if youre referring to it regularly and dont need to file it just yet. Limit folder creation. When youre creating folders, think minimal. Most files and documents can fit somewhere in your hierarchy if youve done a good job of initially mapping it out. In general, only create new folders especially top level folders in documents if you find yourself repeatedly coming back to save similar files in the same place, only to find that it doesnt exist yet. Get used to thinking in hierarchies. Thinking in hierarchies is a learned skill. It takes time to get used to. If you want to manage your files and documents effectively, youll have to learn it. To borrow a bit of pop psychology, there are 3 main things you have to know chunking up, chunking down, and chunking sideways. Start with the assumption that everything fits into a category or hierarchy of similar things. For example, lets take Apple products. Chunking Down, Up and Sideways with Apple Products. At the top, we have a category that encompasses all Apple products. Now lets chunk down move down one hierarchy level. Now we have multiple categories portable computers, desktop computers, mobile devices, music devices, software. Lets chunk down again into mobile devices you have the i. Drivers Hp Psc 1350 Pour Windows 7. Phone and the i. Pad. But if we chunk up from the i. Phone, we can see that it could fit into both categories of mobile devices and music devices. This is entirely possible with most real world hierarchies things can fit in more than one place. Now what if we chunk sideways from the i. Books Logistics Supply Chain Management. Phone We end up with an i. Pad. Chunking sideways describes moving amongst the members of an existing hierarchical level. Applied to your files and documents, the general rule is that they should always sit with other files of the same, equivalent hierarchical level. For example, application installers can sit in the same folder. Dated to do lists can sit in the same folders. Personal letters to friends can sit in the same folder. PDF scans of receipts by month can sit in the same folder. One thing weve adopted at AE is the idea of having a archive folder within a lot of our folders. The reason is this At present we have about 2. Each articlepostcontent piece gets its own folder for holding images, research, text and media related to that content piece. When you have 2. 00 or so of these, it gets hard to find what youre currently working on. So our solution has been that whenever a post or content piece goes live, we move the related folder into archive. This way, all the pieces were currently working on can be easily found, and any older pieces that we want to refer to down the line can also be found be going into archive. Dropbox. Before we get into the nitty gritty of directory organization, I want to give a mention to Dropbox. It is an absolutely amazing tool for backing up your documents and using them between different devices and computers. Its also great for sharing documents with others. If you use Dropbox and have a paid account with storage highly recommended, whatever directory structures we mention below can sit directly in your Dropbox folder rather than your Documents folder. Well clarify below as necessary. Documents. Lets take a look at your personal documents. Regardless of if you use Windows or Mac, you will likely use the usernameDocuments folder on your computer to hold your personal documents. If you happen to do both work and personal tasks on your computer like most online marketers or solo entrepreneurs I know, then you should really create two folders to separate out your personal and business items. If youre using Dropbox, it looks like this DropboxBusinessDropboxDocuments. If youre not using Dropbox, you can similarly do DocumentsBusinessDocumentsPersonal. You could also do With both folders sitting directly under username as long as you pick one method and stick to it, any will work. If youre interested, at Asian Efficiency we share a Dropbox folder for most of our files, so we each have DropboxAsian EfficiencyDropboxDocuments. Now how you actually divide up your personal documents is largely a matter of how you mentally divide up your life. A very basic split would be health, finances, relationships. These would then have subfolders, for example DocumentshealthdentistDocumentshealthdoctorDocumentsfinancesinsuranceDocumentsfinancesChase. You could also do a split by Omni. Focus style areas, like DocumentsfinancesDocumentssocialDocumentsplayDocumentsmindDocumentshealth. The general rule to follow is to pick a folder structure that matches how you mentally organize things. If you use a task management system, its probably not a bad idea to mimic the structure that you use in there too just dont go about creating a today or inbox folder. Remember that files and documents are supposed to be for permanent storage with files not moving around too often, as opposed to fleeting items like tasks.