Staying highly organized is an art form

darkfury said:

I got this folder on my desktop, its called "Stuff" .... when my desktop gets too full i drag everything into the this "Stuff" folder. Inside the Stuff folder is a Stuff folder, and guess whats inside that Stuff folder.

It clogs the index up on my HDD, bogs down virus' and malware scans and takes up HDD space - Been meaning to do something about that damn folder for about 3 years. Even after formatting, it just seems to make its way back again

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Lmfao I cannot believe it, I've been doing the same thing for like 7 years now except the folder is called "Junk" in Estonian for me... Everything goes there, literally EVERYTHING.... If it gets too messy in there I make a folder junk v2 and throw in stuff that might be categorized a bit in some way, like pictures

WhitePassion said:

Lmfao I cannot believe it, I've been doing the same thing for like 7 years now except the folder is called "Junk" in Estonian for me... Everything goes there, literally EVERYTHING.... If it gets too messy in there I make a folder junk v2 and throw in stuff that might be categorized a bit in some way, like pictures

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How funny, I've been doing the same thing since 2004 with the name Crap. It really bites you in the ass when you try to backup the folder - I can't tell you how many errors I've gotten about "long filenames" when really, it's paths. When I get the errors, the paths are usually something like:


Desktop\Crap\Other\Aug2009\blah\blah\May2008\blah\blah\Mar2008\Dec2007\blah\blah\Oct2007\x100


Had one that started with spring of 2012 and ended sometime in 2007. I've gotten better about it though, purchased a big external HD and technically, I've kept it pretty sorted. Such as:


X:\Audio\Recordings\
X:\Audio\Music\
X:\Videos\Watch\
X:\Videos\Canon\
X:\Videos\Movies\
X:\Code\PHP\
X:\Code\C\
X:\Code\VB6\


And so on. For people like me, that's the only way you can do it - attempting to sort through everything you already have, on the same drive, just becomes impossible for some reason. But a brand new drive gives like a weird sense of motivation, and the knowledge that _this_ drive isn't cluttered and if I keep it up, I can keep it that way. So new files/folders are sorted into it as I go, and then slowly here and there, I add in stuff from the other 5 drives. Slowly but surely, it's becoming organized. The Crap folder on the desktop will be the biggest challenge though.

I don't see the benefit of organizing something like bookmarks. I mean I have a shit ton and if I need to find something I just scroll through until I find it. I think it would be a massive waste of time to organize them. It would be "busy" work that you do just to fill the time that doesn't really add very much value. Although I do have a seperate folder for landing pages I'd like to copy/draw inspiration from. Other than that, it all goes to one folder.

My friend has a point to organize his email and delete old emails, to me this also seems like "busy" work. Its just pointless work that you do to think you are being productive. I never delete anything, if I need to find an old email I just use the search feature and I find it really quick.

But other things, like keeping track of expenses, income, ROI, tax things, bills paid, etc I organize like a bad ass. I just have a simple system that makes it quick and easy to put things where they need to go, and it allows me to analyze my behavior over time. That is the kind of stuff I think you should keep organized. Also I keep my desktop screen clutter free and organized using Stardock Fences, and I keep my desk clean. That is just basic shit you learn about productivity.

KHMNTCPR8 said:

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+1 for fences, been using it for about a year now and I really really like it. Also, I agree about the bookmarks thing. When you can just do chrome://bookmarks in Chrome and CTRL-B in Firefox (and both present search boxes) - there's not much need for real organization unless there's some underlining, different reason for it (e.g. displaying them somewhere, sharing them, or something else). Also, something I do to make searching even easier: when I CTRL-D to bookmark a page, I add all kinds of keywords to the end of the title. For example, if I were visiting a page about manually unpacking the latest version of themida - and the title was simply "Unpack it", I'd modify it to be "themida the mida unpack winlicense ollydbg latest current version 5.6" etc, where the title technically looks like gibberish but makes it a lot easier to find it (and then if I want actual title, I'd just visit page). I'm impressed though with Chrome in that you don't even need to do that anymore, all you need to do is remember certain keywords/phrases. For example, if I open a new tab and type "shit you learn" (with the quotes to really narrow it down) in the address bar, the first (and only) autocompleted URL will be this page. Chrome's intelligent in that all of the words on the page can be searched from the address bar, rather than just the URL/page title the way it used to be.

You can search through your bookmarks but if you've got hundreds of them, you never fully know what you've got. Having them organized makes it nice and easy to look through them and see what you may want to take a look at. It also makes it easier if you want to share your bookmarks.

PS. Stardock Fences looks epic, thanks for mentioning it.