I know organizing documents, photos, videos, movies and countless files in my laptop can be overwhelming. But still, I googled and tried some de-clutter techniques to save my time searching for files. Truly, some methods work well and have made my work done faster. So here are my five steps to get rid of my digital clutters.
1. Check and back up important files – As I don’t want to lose any important documents stored in my laptop such as project papers, letters, etc., so I stored two copies of them using cloud storage services like Dropbox, Sky Drive and Google Drive. Using these online storage allows me to retrieve, share and synchronize files easily from any digital devices with Internet access. Another conventional way that I seldom use is synchronize files on other computers or store them in external hard disks to keep files secure.
2. Delete unused and duplicate files – Disk clearing applications like CC cleaner and Disk Cleanup are good for me to clear unnecessary files and free up my disk space. Some programs are really redundant for me, so I decided to uninstall some of them which I don’t really need. For all saved photos, I deleted those with low quality, blurry, duplicate, bad shots and photobomb images that I kept in my laptop for the past five years. At the end, I keep only beautiful and clear pictures in my digital albums.
3. Create a systematic filing system – A high level folder is used to hold some specific sub-folders. Just make it simple, I named the highest file as Desktop, which comprises 6 sub-folders: 1. University, 2. Work, 3. Blog, 4. Entertainment, 5. Documents, and 6. Photos. I like to use numbering systems because all folders will be automatically arranged neatly. For 2nd layer, the University folder holds some sub-folders like 1. Undergraduate, 2. Postgraduate, and so on. So, every time I created a new file, I will put them into the relevant folder.
4. Relocate existing files into the new folders – I consolidated existing folders and stored all the unorganized old documents into the new file structure. Then, I renamed all the files using keyword and date, instead of using Photo1.JPG, I used Birthday-2015-101.JPG. It is clear that this is the 101st photo that I captured during someone’s birthday in 2015.
5. Stick to the new system – I will store new files in the right folder whenever I created or downloaded any new movie, music, and document.
Once my files are better organized, I can spend less time searching for files I want and my laptop run a little smoother than before~ yeah! Feel free to leave a comment and share it~
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