Home > File Management

Organization Method

Where files should be saved:

• If you are in the laptop lease program, regardless of platform, the only place you should be saving files is on the Personal Files volume. The COD Laptop partition holds the operating system and applications. Saving your files to the Personal Files partition will allow us to reimage the boot partition in the event that there is a problem with your computer.

MacOS X

• Most people generally save their files to the Documents folder, or the Desktop. Both of these folders are located in /Users/yourname. You may also have a separate partition or drive where you save files (I have one drive with two partitions, and an additional hard drive with one partition.).

Windows XP

• C:\\Documents and Settings\yourname

School
Work
Family
Personal
Extra Activities

Not everything will fit into these categories, but it’s a start.

Now, go to your computer, and open up your "Documents" folder. We are going to do a little exercise.

1. I want you to create a new folder in the Documents folder and name it “Sort”.

2. Select all of the files and folders in your Documents folder and drag them to the “Sort” folder. (If you are on a Mac, leave any application related folders in place, such as Microsoft Office Data, Eudora Folder, etc.)

3. Once all of the files are in the “Sort” Folder, I want you to create the following folders in your Documents folder:

4. Okay, the easy part is over, but we’ve just set up the framework needed to get organized. Very little time involved so far.

5. Open the “School” folder. You will want to start by making folders labeled with the year and semester. So, if you have course work dating back to the fall of 2003, you will want to have your folders setup something like this:

If you want an extra layer of organization, you may want to have your main folders just have the year, and include the semesters as sub-folders.

6. Once you have these folders, open the folder for the current semester, and start making folders for your current classes. See where this is going? Use the course numbers as your names. You can add the actual course name to the comments field in the Get Info window on the Mac, if you wish.

7. Open one of your class folders. Inside this folder, make a folder for each of the projects you have already completed, and one for your current project. Repeat this for each course folder.

So far, it doesn’t seem like we’ve done much, right? All of your files are still in a jumble inside of that “Sort” folder, and nothing has been moved yet. That’s about to change.

Okay, we are going to get started on sorting the files you need most - your course files for the current semester.

8. Open the 2006 > Spring folder, and move its window to the left side of your screen. Open up the Sort folder, and move its window until it is to the right of the 2006 > Spring folder.

9. Start moving any files that you immediately know belong to this semester, and drop them into the course folder. Don’t worry about sorting them into the individual project or assignment folders yet, unless you immediately know where the files belong.

This may take awhile, so come back to this document when you are finished.

Once you have your recent coursework sorted into course folders, you will want to start looking at older coursework, moving it to the appropriate year folder, and course folder (hint: if you did not already know this, you can look at the file info to see the date modified. This will help you determine what semester you created a particular file.)

Let’s move on to your Work folder.

10. Locate anything at all related to your job or resume and move it to your Work folder. If you freelance, you will definitely want to create folders with project or job names, and sort files accordingly. You will also want to create a folder for your resume, and probably one for your portfolio. Anytime while sorting that you come across something that could be used in your portfolio, you may want to create an alias to it and place the alias in the Portfolio or Resume folder.

Repeat this process for the other main folders that you created. Anything that doesn’t belong to the main groups should go into the Miscellaneous folder.

Once you have the initial sort done, you can go back and create more specific folders, and sort even further.

Again, this document is just to help you get started on learning how to manage your files. Only you can decide the level of organization that will work best for you. The best advice I can give you, though, is that it is far easier to start out with these organizational stuctures in place than it is to have to go through years of files later, especially on a deadline.

Here are a few helpful hints:

1. Keep a “Receipts” folder in your Personal folder. When you order items online, in addition to printing a hard copy of the receipt, you can also print to a PDF file. This way, if you are away from home and need to refer to a confirmation number, you have it the file on your computer, and not just at home.

2. Place aliases or shortcuts to commonly used folders on the desktop. This way, when you have new files to save or add, you can easily access your organizational folders.

3. Place aliases or shortcuts to commonly used applications on the Desktop in Windows, or in the Dock in MacOS X. The real applications can stay where they need to be in order to work correctly, and you can still have the convenience of having ready access to your programs.

4. When working on projects for class, keep copies of all required "dependencies," such as fonts, images, or other source work, in the same project folder. This will help when you want to reprint items for your portfolio. It is not fun to try to track down a specific font, which may have been pulled from your favorite downloads site. Trust me.