The Best Way to Organize Your Computer Files Der beste Weg, Ihre Computerdateien zu organisieren La mejor forma de organizar los archivos del ordenador A melhor forma de organizar os ficheiros do seu computador 组织计算机文件的最佳方法

- If your desktop looks like this,

then you and I need to have a chat.

And well even if not, you're gonna wanna stick around ||||||||留下來|

for this video because remember

when I said my paper file organization video

was the most exciting video you were ever going to watch?

Well, that is a thing of the past

because everyone knows that everything gets cooler

when it makes the transition from analog to digital. ||||||類比信號||

So buckle your seatbelts once again, |繫好||繫好安全帶||

because this week, we are talking about how to organize

and systematized the files within your computer. |系統化|||||

So organizing your computer files is simultaneously easier ||||||同時地|

and harder than organizing your paper real world files.

It's easier because computer files don't weigh anything, ||||||稱重|

they don't take up any physical space,

so they can't really create a mess on your desk

or in your living space.

But it's harder number one, because well,

we were never taught how to organize computer files.

I don't know about you,

but I remember being an elementary school, middle school |||||小學|||

and having teachers tell me

to put things in separate folders, |||||資料夾

to have a Trapper Keeper, all that kind of stuff. |||活頁夾|活頁夾|||||

But when it came to my computer files,

no one was ever around to teach me nunca hubo nadie que me enseñara

how to organize my folder structure, ||||資料夾|

where I should save things, all that kind of good stuff.

And secondly, we create much more on the computer

than we do in the real world these days.

We have so many different documents, pictures, music files,

so it can easily get out of hand much quicker |||||||||更快

than it can in the real world.

And for that reason,

I think it is crucial to create a usable logical structure ||||關鍵||||可用的|邏輯的|

from the get go with your computer files.

This is much more important than it is in paper files |||||||||紙本文件|

because, well, in the real world,

there just isn't a whole lot to have to reorganize |||||||||重新整理

if you realize that you've made a mess.

But if your computer is a mess,

you might have hundreds of files sitting on your desktop.

So step one is to create an organizational structure

of folders that makes it easy

to find anything you're looking for quickly.

And there's a couple different rules here.

Number one,

every single file in your system should be within a folder

that represents it well, a specific folder. |代表|||||

Nothing should be sitting out on the desktop,

and nothing should be sitting in random folders,

like Documents or Downloads. |||下載

Everything should be in something that makes sense.

But number two, you wanna have a structure

that makes it easy to find those folders themselves.

Now, you could just have one long list of folders

on one particular level of your system,

but that's gonna make

things pretty cumbersome, pretty quick. ||繁瑣||

So instead, you wanna follow in the steps

of that great philosopher, King Xzibit, |||那位偉大的哲學家|國王|Xzibit 國王

and start putting folders inside of folders.

I call this a tree structure. ||||樹狀結構|

If you think of a tree at the bottom, you have the trunk, ||||||||||||樹幹

and then that trunk eventually branches off |||||分支|

into main branches which in turn branch ||||||分支

into smaller branches.

And that splitting process keeps going on ||分裂過程||||

and on until you reach the leaves.

And actually if you look closely at a leaf, ||||||||葉子

you'll see that the branching process even continues ||||分支過程|||

with vein splitting off from the midrib. |葉脈|||||葉脈

Bet you didn't think you're gonna 賭你沒想到|||||

some tree anatomy in this video, huh? ||樹木解剖學||||是嗎

And if you look elsewhere, ||||如果你看其他地方

you'll find the structure replicated both in nature ||||複製|||

and in manmade systems. ||人造的|

Take your body's circulatory system for example, ||身體的|循環系統|||

all the blood goes through arteries from the heart. |||||動脈|||

But from there, it splits off into smaller

and smaller blood vessels

until it finally reaches the smallest of them, |||||最小的||

the capillaries and gets delivered

to the exact right place in the body.

And road systems are very similar.

Any two points in a city separated

by a lot of distance are going to be best reached

by first making your way to a highway or freeway

or main road and then branching off into smaller

and smaller residential road.

And just as the branching paths of trees, blood vessels

and road systems provide the most efficient way

of moving resources around,

a tree structure provides the most efficient

and usable way of organizing your files.

So the first thing you're gonna wanna do is

to create this tree structure,

which starts with what's called the root.

Essentially the trunk of the tree.

And in my file system, which I'm gonna show you

for the rest of this video as an example,

the root is called Google Drive.

And the reason for this is that I use Google Drive,

which actually just recently changed its name to Google One,

to sync all my files up to the cloud |同步|||||||雲端

and between all my different computers.

But we're gonna talk about that a little bit later.

Within the root, I think it makes the most sense

to organize your main files by kind of the main categories

of your life or as I like to call them life buckets. |||||||||||人生桶

So the buckets of my life include College,

College Info Geek, Learning, for learning projects,

My Life, which is all my personal files, like taxes,

and apartment files, things like that.

Now, I do want to note that this is not the only way

of organizing your file tree.

And that is something that could be repeated

for every single level of the file tree.

In fact, if you go look

at the datacurator filetree project on GitHub,

you will see that the top level

of their suggested file tree actually has folders split up

by media type, audio files, documents,

literature, video, etc.

Personally, I like to keep anything

that isn't a document in a specific media folder

within my file system.

And that brings me to kind of the main point here.

Your file system should be expandable,

it should be flexible,

it should maintain its logic when it does expand.

But most of all, it should represent the way

that your brain organizes files.

Assuming you are the only person

who's going to be you using this folder,

because I know a lot of you guys are gonna go

into the professional world, start working in companies

and start using shared directories.

So with your own file system,

you can kinda query your brain a little bit more often,

but with shared directories,

you're probably gonna wanna adhere

to some agreed upon rules and conventions.

So I wanna go over just a couple of here.

First one is organizing by category,

which is exactly what I'm doing in that main folder,

in my file tree, and it's the structure

that I adhere to for most sub folders as well.

To give an example,

let's go into my College Info Geek folder.

This is where basically any file related

to my business goes, whether it's LLC paperwork,

or the thumbnail for this video.

So once we drill into that folder,

we're gonna see some folders like Business, Content,

Courses, Projects, Speaking and Tools.

And within the Content folder to go a little bit deeper,

we're gonna see other folders like Articles, Email List,

Graphics, Podcasts, and Videos.

And with this structure,

it is easy to find pretty much anything

that I need really, really quickly.

And just to give you an example,

I'm gonna throw the path of a random file

onto the screen right here

so you can see the logical sequence of steps

that I would take to get to it.

And again, it's very easy to find this file

and pretty much anything else.

That being said,

organizing by category isn't the only way

you can organize your files.

And you're gonna get into certain sub-folders

where it makes sense to adopt a different structure such

as organizing by date.

And I find this particular structure to be very useful

when the files that I'm trying to organize would fill

so many different category based folders

that would end up with a huge long list.

And a great example is my college classes.

During my college career, I took over 40 different classes.

And well I could just shove

every single class folder into my college folder,

that would be kinda messy,

I'd be looking at a list of 40 different folders

every time I needed to go save or open a file.

And most importantly, during every single semester,

I would go into that college folder

and I would see a bunch of very irrelevant folders

from previous semesters.

So instead of just organizing by category,

I instead created another level of organization

by splitting things up by year.

So I've got Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior.

If we go into say, Sophomore,

we're gonna see all the classes I took

during my sophomore year.

Then once we drill into a class based folders,

such as English 313, we're gonna see all the files

that had to do with that class,

but also project specific folders as well.

So if you have a project, but lots of different files,

I think it absolutely makes sense

to group those files into their own folder.

But anything that's kinda like an individual handout

for the class, just keep that in the class folder,

and you'll be able to easily find it

as long as you name it intelligently.

And speaking of naming your files,

that is actually step two in this process,

which is honestly an ongoing process,

'cause you're always gonna be naming files.

But I do wanna talk a little bit about

how you should name your files.

And we don't have to talk a lot here

because the main principle is

that your files should be named relatively specifically.

You should be able to know at a glance

what it means within the context

of its location in your file tree.

And I make this point because there are a lot

of other productivity gurus

and organizational gurus out there

who have these overly complex file naming conventions.

They're putting the date in their file name,

they're putting, like every bit of context they can.

And honestly, I think this is a waste of time,

because as long as you are being vigilant

about where you're saving your files in your file system,

then each file really only needs a little bit of specificity

for you to know at a glance what it is.

So obviously, don't name your homework, just homework.docx

or paper.docx.

Give it a name that at least jogs your memory

as to what it should be,

but don't worry about being overly specific either.

And that brings us to step three in the process,

which I referenced earlier in the video,

I think that you should absolutely use a Cloud Sync app,

like Google One slash Google Drive

as the root of your file tree.

So if you don't know what a Cloud Sync app is,

basically, it's an app like Dropbox, Google One,

Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud Drive,

there are some other ones out there as well.

They basically sit on your computer,

and they upload anything within the sync folder

to the cloud, and then sync it to any other computers

that you have as well.

And using an app like this

gives you several different benefits.

Number one, all of your files are kept up to date

across your entire system.

So if you make a change to a Photoshop document

or a Word document on one computer,

that change will be dutifully synced up to the cloud,

and to any other computer that you have.

Secondly, you have access to your files, wherever you are.

You got access on your laptop, you got access on your phone,

I'm actually reading the script

for this video off of this bone right now.

Even have access on any computer in the world

as long as you can log into your Google

or your Dropbox account and download those files.

So that brings us to a question,

which Cloud Sync app should you use, which one is the best?

Well, I'm gonna go ahead

and recommend Google One for most people.

Now there are a lot of competitors out there again,

Microsoft One Drive, Box, sync Dropbox, iCloud Drive,

but I think Google One makes the most sense, number one,

because they give you 15 gigabytes of free space,

which is much more than any other competitor.

And I think that unless you're a content creator

or photographer or graphic designer,

you're gonna take a long time to fill up

that 15 gigabytes of free space.

So that just keeps you from having to spend a whole lot

of money right up front.

Secondly, if you do need more space,

with a competitor like Dropbox,

you have to immediately go up to their two terabyte plan

for 10 bucks a month.

Whereas with Google One or Google Drive,

or whatever you wanna call it,

it's just $2 a month for 100 gigabytes.

And again, I really don't think most people need

a whole lot more than 100 gigabytes.

But what you do need regardless of who you are,

even if you don't need a tonne of extra space is

to make sure that your files

are adequately backed up and secured.

Now, if you are using a Cloud Sync app like Google One,

then you do have some measure of protection

for at least hard drive failure on one computer.

So if I have all my files just on this one computer,

just on the hard drive,

not synced to Google One or anything like that,

and this goes down the toilet,

well, this probably won't fit down the toilet,

but someone tries to force it down the toilet

or someone steals it, or Loki comes out of a portal

and cast a spell on it,

he gives it legs and runs away from me, right?

I would lose all the files,

because they're only on this hard drive.

But if they're synced to the cloud,

and all I lose when this thing runs away from me

and goes to frightened children is the hardware itself.

And this computer can be replaced with money,

but all those files, they cannot be replaced.

So at least with the Cloud Sync app,

you have some of measure protection

against hardware failure.

But what you don't have protection against is people

who are malicious.

If someone goes in and like hacks your Google account

and deletes all those files,

then you don't have a whole lot of protection against that.

Now with Google One and a lot of Cloud Sync apps,

you can go back in time and restore files out of the trash.

But you usually have like a 30 day time limit on that.

But again, somebody could go in there and empty the trash.

Or you could accidentally change a file

and not realize it until a month down the road and realize,

oh, well, I needed the old version of that file,

and now it's gone forever.

So I think you should have a backup strategy

that extends beyond Cloud Sync.

And there are a couple of different options.

So the option that I use personally,

and the one that I recommend for most people is

to use a separate cloud backup app

like Backblaze or CrashPlan.

And I'm gonna use Backblaze here

'cause it's the one that I use,

but for about $5 a month or 60 bucks a year,

they will backup an unlimited amount

of data on your computer across any hard drive connected

to it with the exception

of anything like network attached storage.

But the other thing is

that provides some measure of redundancy.

If something gets into your Google Drive and messes with it,

or someone deletes all those files,

they're also backed up and Backblaze.

And for me, I wanna have my data

in multiple different places.

This is kind of a pain in the butt to do,

but if there ever comes a time

where one of those data silos goes down,

you're gonna be very happy you took the precaution 당신은 당신이 예방 조치를 취할 매우 행복 할거야

and had a backup.

Now the other option, which I think is a little less robust

than good cloud backup,

but it's still useful is to just get your hands

on a small external hard drive, plug it in once a month,

and copy your data over to that one drive

and then just keep it unplugged from the computer,

keep it stored somewhere that's secret and safe.

And then actually remember

to plug it back in once a month and make that backup.

And that brings us to the final step in this process,

which is to make use of shortcuts

to more quickly access the most used folders

and files in your system.

Because here's the thing,

when you have this beautifully organized tree structure,

sometimes you're gonna have files

that are six, seven, eight levels deep from the root.

And if you need to access those files a lot,

you're gonna be clicking through

eight different levels of folders,

and that is not very efficient.

But luckily computers allow you

to create shortcuts or aliases.

These are kind of interchangeable terms

to access those files quickly.

But even more efficient than shortcuts, in my opinion,

is the Quick Access and Favorites areas of the Finder

and Explore on both Mac and Windows.

So on Windows, it's called Quick Access,

you can easily pin any folder or file to it on the sidebar.

And in Mac OS, it's called Favorites,

and it gives you the exact same functionality.

So if you see my explorer here,

you'll see that I am have pinned many different folders

that I access on a regular basis.

Some are permanently there,

but you're also gonna see folders related

to the individual video that I'm working on

at any given time.

So right now you're gonna see 172 Computer File Organization

since that's the video that I'm currently working on.

So, start using Quick Access, start using Favorites,

start creating shortcuts,

and you're gonna find yourself navigating

your file tree much more quickly.

And then as long as you maintain the integrity

of that file tree, as long as you maintain vigilance

when saving new files and creating new folders,

you're never going to lose another file again

and you're gonna be so much better organized.

Of course, the best way to stay organized is

to be very deliberate about the projects that you take on,

about the files that you create in the first place,

about the content that you consume.

This is called being an essentialist.

It involves being very in tune with your priorities

and your values in life.

And if you wanna get better at doing this,

I have a book recommendation for you.

"Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less"

by Greg McKeown is one

of my absolute favorite self improvement books,

it's one of the most useful

that I have found in my personal experience.

And if you want to actually listen to that book for free,

you can do so by going over to audible.com/thomas

or by texting Thomas to 500-500 on your phone.

Doing that will get you a free 30 day trial

of Audible service which comes

with a free Audiobook download,

which can be anything you want.

But of course, I'm going to recommend "Essentialism."

But it also comes with two Audible originals

you cannot get anywhere else along with tonnes

of audio workout, fitness, yoga and meditation programs.

And of course, Audible is the best place on the internet

to get your hands on audiobooks.

They have an unmatched library with all the best sellers,

lots of obscure stuff and things

from basically any genre that you could want.

And they also have an excellently designed app

with a lot of great features, including Sleep Timer

for you using it at night,

the ability to add notes

at specific timestamps within your book

and easy controls for jumping forwards or backwards,

just in case you wanna fast forward

or if you didn't catch something, you can easily go back

and listen to it again.

So once again, if you wanna get a free trial

of Audible service for 30 days

that comes with a free Audiobook download,

two Audible original that you cannot get anywhere else,

and all those audio workout meditation programs,

go over to audible.com/thomas and sign up,

or text Thomas to 500-500 on your phone.

Big thanks as always goes out Audible

for sponsoring this video

and being a big supporter of my channel.

And thank you as well for watching.

Hopefully you found this video helpful.

Hopefully it was a great complement

to that paper organization video

which I'm gonna put right here in case you didn't see it.

And of course, you can always subscribe right there,

if you haven't done so already

and you wanna get notifications of new videos.

Click right there to get a free copy

of my book on how to earn better grades.

Or if you haven't seen my latest collaboration video

with my friend, Matt D'Avella,

I'm gonna have that linked right here.

So definitely check that out.

Thanks again for watching

and we'll see you in the next video.