POWERtools
for novices
Making Your Computer Work
for You
Suggested Approaches for Exercise 11
Use pencil and paper to plan the ideal file structure for your
own files. Here are some ideas to consider.
Size of Folders
- Use a folder to store a set of files that are related in
some natural way.
- Try to organize things so that each folder has a reasonable
number of files in it. What's reasonable? One is probably too
few, unless you are planning to add more. Two hundred is probably
too many, because it's too hard to look at the list of files
and find the one you are looking for. The right number lies somewhere
in between, and it varies according to the preference of the
individual.
- When a folder gets too large, reorganize the folder by subdividing.
Form versus Function
- Some of us like to organize our files by grouping files with
related content. I have a folder for planning that contains both
word-processed documents and spreadsheets.
- Some of us like to organize our files by grouping files made
with the same application. Bruce puts all of his Word files in
one folder and all of his Excel files in another folder.
Top-Down Design
- Think about all of the things that you do on your computer
at a very high level. What are your major activities? These give
you your top-level folders. When I was a faculty member, my top-level
folders were teaching,, research,, and service. When I became
a department head, I added administration as a top-level folder.
- Once you have your top-level folders determined, take each
one of them and divide them into pieces that will become your
second-level folders. For teaching, I had one second-level folder
for each course that I taught.
- Continue this process until the folders at the bottom level
contain a reasonable number of files.
Age of Data
- If you find yourself repeating the same process regularly
and saving files each time, consider naming your folders by the
time period and storing the files appropriately. For example,
I have a folder named recommendations, and its subfolders are
2000, 1999, 1998, etc. I store letters of recommendation for
students according to the year. By connecting their year of graduation
with my folder names, I am pretty fast at finding a particular
student's letter when I need to update it.
- If you have age-related folder names for data that can be
deleted after some time has elapsed, it's easy to throw away
a whole folder once it gets to a certain age. I have a folder
called mail99 that has all of my email from last academic year.
On July 1, 2000, I'll move all of my current email files to mail2000,
start a new folder for current email, and throw out mail99.
Go back to the main documentation
page.
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