If your desktop looks like this then you and I need to have a chat and even if not you’re gonna want to stick around for this video because remember when I said my paper file organization video is the most exciting video you’re ever going to watch well that is a thing of the past because everyone knows that everything gets cooler when it makes the transition from analog to digital so buckle your seatbelts once again because this week we are talking about how to organize and systematize the files with in your computer so organizing your computer files is simultaneously easier and harder than organizing your paper bill world files it’s easier because computer files don’t weigh anything they don’t take up any physical space so they can’t really create a mess on your desk or in your living space but it’s harder number one because what we were never taught how to organize computer files.
I don’t know about you but I remember being in elementary school middle school and having teachers tell me to put things in you know separate folders have a trapper keeper all that kind of stuff but when it came to my computer files no one was ever around to teach me how to organize my folder structure where I should save things all that kind of good stuff and secondly we create much more on the computer and we do it in the real world these days we have so many different documents pictures music files so you can easily get out of hand much quicker than I can in the real world and for that reason I think it is crucial to create a usable logical structure from the get go with your computer files this is much more important is the paper files because well in the real world just isn’t a whole lot have to reorganize if you realize that you’ve made a mess but if your computer is a mess you might have hundreds of files sitting on your desktop so step one is to create an organizational structure of folders that makes it easy to find anything you’re looking for quickly there’s a couple different roles here number one every single file in your system should be with in a folder that represents it well a specific folder nothing should be sitting out on the desktop and nothing should be sending random folders like documents or downloads everything.
Should be in something that makes sense but number 2 you want to have a structure that makes it easy to find those folders themselves now you could just have one long list of folders on one particular level of your system but that’s gonna make things pretty cumbersome pretty quick so instead you want to follow the steps of the great philosopher king exhibit and start putting folders inside of folders I call this a tree structure if you think of a tree at the bottom you have the trunk and the trunk eventually branches off into main branches which in turn branch into smaller branches not splitting process keeps going on and on until you reach the leaks and actually if you look closely at a leaf you’ll see that the branching process even continues with vain splitting off from the mid rib but you don’t think your Lenten tree now to be in this video and if you look elsewhere you’ll find the structure aplicativos in nature and in man made systems take your body’s circulatory system for example all the blood goes through arteries from the heart but from there it splits off into smaller and smaller blood vessels until it finally reaches the smallest them the capillaries and gets delivered to the exact right place in the body and road systems are very similar any 2 points in a city separated by a lot of distance are going to be best reached by first making your way to a highway or freeway or main road and then branching off into smaller and smaller residential roads and just as the branching paths of trees blood vessels and road systems provide the most efficient way of moving resources around a tree structure provides the most efficient and usable way of organizing files.
so the first thing you’re gonna want to do is to create this tree structure which starts with what’s called the route is actually the trunk of the tree and in my file system which I’m gonna show you the rest this video as an example the root is called Google drive and the reason for this is that I use Google drive which actually just recently changed its name to Google one out to sync all my files to the cloud and between all my different computers but we’re gonna talk about that a little bit later within the route I think it makes the most sense to organize your. Main files by kind of the main categories of your life or as I like to call them life buckets so the buckets of my life include college college info geek learning for learning projects my life which is all my personal files like taxes and your apartment files things like that now I do want to note that this is not the only way to organize your file tree and that is something that could be repeated for every single level of the file tree in fact if you go look at the data curator file tree project and get help you’ll see that the top level of their suggested voluntary actually has folder slip by media type audio files documents literature video and central personally I like to keep anything that isn’t a document in a specific media folder within my file system and that brings me to kind of the main point here your file system should be expandable it should be flexible it should maintain its logic when it does expand but most of all it should represent the way that your brain organizes files assuming you are the only person is going to be using in this folder because I know a lot of you guys are going to go in the professional world start working companies start using shared directories so with your own file system you can kind of create your brain a little bit more often but with shared directories you’re probably gonna want to adhere to some agreed upon rules and conventions so wanted over just a couple here first one is organizing by category which is exactly what I’m doing in that main folder my file tree and its destruction it here too for most subfolders as well even example it’s going to my college info geek folder this is where basically any file related to my business goes whether it’s all C. paperwork or the thumb.
now for this video so once we drill into that folder we’re gonna see some folders like business content courses projects speaking and tools and within the content ordered a little bit deeper we’re gonna see other folders like articles email list graphics podcasts and videos and with this structure, it is easy to find pretty much anything that I need a really really quickly and just to give an example in the throat. The path of a random file on the screen right here so you can see the logical sequence of steps that I would take to get to it and again it’s very easy to find this file and pretty much anything else that being said organizing by category isn’t the only way you can organize your files you’re gonna get into certain subfolders where it makes sense to adopt a different structure such as organizing by date and I find this particular structure to be very useful when the files and I’m trying to organize what fills so many different category based folders I would end up with a huge long list and a great example is my college classes during my college career I took over 40 different classes and while I could just shove every single class border into my college voter.
now become a mess you’d be looking at a list of 40 different folders every time I need to go save or open a file and most importantly during every single semester I would go to that college folder and I would see a bunch of very irrelevant folders from previous semesters so instead of just organizing by category I instead created another level of organization by splitting things up by years look at freshman sophomore junior and senior if we go into say sophomore we’re gonna see all the classes I took during my sophomore year then once we drill into a class based folders such as English 313 receive all the files that had to do with that class but also project specific folders as well so if you have a project of lots of different files I think it absolutely makes sense to group those files into their own folder but anything that’s kind of like an individual handout for the class just keep up the cross border and you’ll be able to easily find it as long as you name it intelligently and speaking of naming your files there’s actually.
step 2 in this process which is honestly an ongoing process because you’re always gonna be naming files but I do want to talk a little bit about how you should name your files and we don’t have to talk a lot here because the main principle is that your file should be named relatively specifically you should be able to know at a glance what it means within the context of implication in your file tree and I make this point because there are a lot of other productivity grew ruse in organizational. Groups out there who have these overly complex file naming conventions they’re putting the date in their file name they’re putting like every bit of context they can and honestly I think this is a waste of time because as long as you’re being vigilant about where you’re saving your files in your file system then each file really only needs a little bit of specificity for you to know at a glance what it is so obviously don’t name your homework just homework.doc acts are paper doc doc acts give it a name that at least jogs your memory as to what it should be but don’t worry about being overly specific either.
end of that brings us to step 3 of the process which I referenced earlier in the video I think that you should absolutely use a cloud sync apps like Google one slash Google drive as the fruit of your file tree so if you don’t account sync app is basically it’s an app like Dropbox Google one Microsoft OneDrive iCloud drive there are some other ones out there as well they basically sit on your computer and then upload anything with and the sync folder to the cloud and sync it to any other computers that you have as well and using an app like this gives you several different benefits number one all of your files are kept up to date across your entire system so if you make a change to a Photoshop document or a word document on one computer that change will be dutifully sync up to the cloud and to any other computer that you have secondly you have access to your files wherever you are he got access on your laptop you got access on your phone makes reading the script for this video of this phone right now I’m even access on any computer in the world as long as you can log into your Google or Dropbox account and download those files so that brings us to a question which cloud sync apps should you use which one is the best well I’m gonna go ahead and recommend Google one for most people now there are a lot of our competitors out there again Microsoft OneDrive box sync Dropbox iCloud drive but I think Google one makes the most sense number one because they give you 15 gigabytes of free space which is much more than. Any other competitor and I think that unless you’re a content creator or photographer or graphic designer you’re gonna take a long time to fill up that 15 gigabytes of free space so that just keeps you from having to spend a whole lot of money right up front secondly if you do need more space with a competitor like drop box you have to immediately go up there 2 terabyte plan for 10 Bucks a month whereas with Google wonder who will drive or did you want to call it it’s just $2 a month for 100 gigabytes and again I really don’t think most people need a whole lot more than 100 gigabytes but what you do need regardless of who you are even if you don’t need a ton of extra space is to make sure that your files are adequately backed up and secured now if you are using a cloud sync app like Google one then you do have some measure of protection for at least hard drive failure on one computer right so if I have all my files just on this one computer just on a hard drive not since school one or anything like that and this goes down the toilet well this probably won’t fit on the toilet but someone tries to force it down the toilet right or someone steals it or Loki comes out of a portal and cast a spell on to give it legs and runs away from me right I would lose all the files because they’re only on this hard drive but if they’re sync to the cloud all I lose when this thing runs away from me and goes to frighten children is the hardware itself and this computer can be replaced with money but all those files they cannot be replaced so at least with a cloud sync app you have some measure of protection against hardware failure but we don’t have protection against is people who are malicious right.
if someone goes in and like hacks your Google account and delete all those files then you have a whole lot of protection against that now with Google one and a lot of thought sync apps you can go back in time and restore files out of the trash which usually have a 30 day time limit on that but again somebody could go in there and empty the trash or you could accidentally change a file and not realize it until a month down the road and realized well I needed the old version that file and now it’s gone forever so I think you should have a backup. Strategy that extends beyond the cloud sync and there are a couple of different options so the option that I use personally and the 1 that I recommend for most people is to use a separate cloud backup apps like backblaze or crash plants animals back place here is the 1 that I use but for about $5 a month or 60 Bucks a year they will back up an unlimited amount of data on your computer across any hard drive connected to it with the exception of any like network attached storage but the other thing is that provides some measure of redundancy if something gets into your Google drive and messes with it or some inflatables files they’re also backed up and back please and for me I want to have my data in multiple different places this is kind of a pain in the **** to do but if there ever comes a time where 1 of those you know 1 of those data silos goes down if you’re gonna be very happy you took the precaution and had a back up now the other option which I think is a little less robust than good cloud backup but it’s still useful is to just get your hands on a small external hard drive plug it in once a month and copy your data over to that hard drive and then just keep it unplugged from the computer keep it stored somewhere that secret and safe and then actually remember to plug it back in once a month and make that back up and that brings us to the final step in this process which is to make use of short cuts to more quickly access the most used folders and files in your system because here’s the thing when you have this beautifully organized tree structure sometimes you can have files that are 678 levels deep from the root and if you need to access those files a lot you’re gonna be clicking through different levels of folders and that is not very efficient but luckily computers allow you to create short cuts or aliases these are kind of interchangeable terms to access those files quickly but even more efficient in short cuts in my opinion is the quick access and favorite areas of the finder and explore on both mac and windows 7 windows called pick access you can easily pen any folder or file to it on the side bar and in mac OS X. cult favorites and give you the exact same functionality.
so if you see my explorer here you’ll see that I. Have penned many different folders that I access on a regular basis some are permanently there but you’re also gonna see folders related to the individual video that I’m working on at any given time so right now you’re gonna see 172 computer file organization since that’s a video that I’m currently working on so start using quick access start using favored start creating shortcuts and you’re by yourself navigating your file tree much more quickly and then as long as you maintain the integrity of that file tree as long as you maintain vigilance and saving your files and creating new folders you’re never going to lose another file again and you can be so much better organized first the best way to stay organized is to be very deliberate about the projects that you take on about the files that you create in the first place but the content that you consume this call being an essentialist animals being very in tune with your priorities and your values in life and if you wanna get better at doing this I have a book recommendation for you essentialism the disciplined pursuit of less by Greg McEwan is 1 of my absolute favorite self improvement books it’s 1 of the most useful that I have found my personal experience and if you want to actually listen to that book for free you can do so by going over to audible.com slash Thomas or by texting Thomas the 500 500 on your phone doing that will be a free 30 day trial bottle service which comes with a free audiobook download which can be anything you want to put a course.
I’m going to recommend essentialism but it also comes with 2 audible originals you cannot get anywhere else along with tons of all your workout fitness yoga and meditation programs and of course audible is the best place on the internet to get your hands on audio books they have an unmatched library with all the bestsellers lots of secure stuff and things from basically any genre that you could want and they also have an excellent designed apple had lots of great features including sleep timer for using at night the ability to add notes at specific time stamp in your book and easy controls for jumping forwards or backwards just in case you want passport or feeding catch something you can easily go back and listen to it again so once again if you want to get a free trial bottle service for 30 days that comes with a free audiobook download to audible originals. You cannot get anywhere else and all those audio work out meditation programs go over audible.com slash Thomas and sign up or text Thomas to 1000 on your phone thanks as always goes out audible for sponsoring this video and being a big supporter of my channel and thank you as well for watching hopefully you found this video helpful hopefully was a great compliment to that people organization video which I’m going to put right here in case you didn’t see it of course you can always subscribe right there if you haven’t done so already and you wanna get notifications of new videos click right there to get a free copy of the book and had earned better grades or if you haven’t seen my latest collaboration video with my friend Matt development have that linked right here so definitely check that out thanks again for watching and we’ll see you in the next video.
