In my example these would be the best photos from the city trips and the rafting trip. I copy and paste my select favourites (I actually don't use shortcuts here, because I like redundancy with these photos) into a folder titled "_best of (album)" for that album. For example, if I went to 2 cities and then went white water rafting, those would be my 3 albums. Then I subdivide each album into smaller albums if necessary (I try to keep fewer than 100 per album). When I upload photos, I first go through each one and delete ones I don't like (blurred, several repeat shots but one is the best, etc). One reason it is better than copying and pasting is that a shortcut folder will always update itself when the parent is updated. The shortcut idea is one of my favourites! It is so simple yet effective that I wish I thought of it myself. Especially when you have Terabytes of storage and data. I award myself when I reach a new amount of "free space".ĭigital hoarding is so much easier to do IMO and it takes so much more time to clean. With 5 PCs, 2 servers and 3 NAS boxes I've had to dedicate myself on a weekly or daily basis to change things. Fighting back chaos takes energy and time, even in the digital realm. I spent an hour cleaning out 170GB of files last night. It takes a snapshot of your hard drive or a file structure you choose and it breaks it down by size and percent of disk space and it sorts it by type and gives you a graphical view of what your hard drive looks like by size. I highly recommend WinDirStat if you're on a PC for finding files. It's also harder to see digital clutter as we're limited by our view on a monitor and often within a folder. you can have 10 copies of the same thing in 10 different places, last I checked I can make copies of my guitars :) ) I think you shared this (or someone recently did) and I'm glad it's being reposted.ĭigital clutter is often 10x worse than real clutter. I hope this helps anyone struggling with a cluttered computer :)ĮDIT: Changed "in the root" to "as far up as possible" to avoid confusion - It's not in the registry! Right now it is on a hard drive different from the operating system. If too many files do accumulate in a folder, I just subdivide it. This is usually quite easy, and I don't need to worry too much about the other folders because no junk gets put there automatically. I make sure to clean out my "downloads" and "inbox" folder. ![]() Every once in a while I purge this folder. This is where I keep random stuff I download. There are shortcuts in here for the files I access often On the desktop I keep an "inbox" folder, and within are my active projects. If I feel like a file or folder should live in 2 or more places at once, I put it in one place and create a shortcut (alias in Mac). ![]() For example I downloaded the manual for my microwave (because I got rid of the physical copy), and instead of saving it as "2440266MWO_3123g491" in the download folder I saved it as "Microwave Manual" in my "Manuals" folder. Following from above, whenever I am downloading something I find a home for it (and name it logically, too!). That way if I want to find a particular payslip I can search "payslip" and I will find it.ĭownload or save directly into where you will keep it. For example, my payslips are titled with the format "YYYY_MM_Payslip". By having proper names for files, it makes them easier to identify and search for. If you use 'my documents' and other default folders, you will find programs also like to put their files and folders there without your consent, which clutters them! By putting things into my own file system, I choose what files go where and the computer self-clutters away from my files. Nothing goes into the default computer folders. This is roughly how it is divided, to give you an idea: To create this, I started by creating a "home" and "work" folder and started putting files into them. I created a folder called "Darkstar's_Files" as far up as possilbe, where all my files go. I recommend you read the article, but here is what I have personally done:Ĭreate an overarching folder. I got a new computer and it was so easy to transfer just one folder and know I had what I wanted and was leaving all the junk behind. I find that the reasons for decluttering the physical world are similar to a computer, so I thought I would post this.įor the longest time my computer was a cluttered mess: so many icons on the desktop I could barely see the background, finding files was difficult, the downloads folder a huge mess, and knowing where to put things was confusing.Ībout a year ago, I found this article and my computer has been clutter-free ever since: my desktop has 1 icon on it, my downloads folder is virtually empty, and I know exactly where to look when searching for something.
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