This guest post is from Janice Simon, MA, project director for Faculty Development at MD Anderson. Janice is also a certified professional organizer (CPO). She works with MD Anderson faculty on organizing and time management.
A recent post on Tech.Edu focused on formal organizational schemes or taxonomies for educational content. On a more basic level, one of the questions I frequently receive as an organizer is how to create a personal filing system for digital files. If you have ever searched madly for that final jpg file for a PowerPoint presentation you know the problem.
First, where to store the files? At work I recommend storing your files in the space allocated to you on a file server since it is regularly backed up and safer than keeping files on your hard drive.If you want to revamp your filing system, you should first sketch out an outline. What are your major categories? What sub-categories fall under them? This outline becomes your map.
Let's use my own server directory as an example. I have a category called "Organizing" - no surprise there. Under Organizing, I have the following sub-categories:
- Articles
- My Presentations
- Technology
I would refrain from having too many levels of your sub-categories. You don't want to have so many sub-folders under a category that you only have one document filed in it. It's the equivalent of having a file folder with one piece of paper.
Create the folders and systematically drop files into the folders. Depending on how many documents you have, this could take some time, but devoting 10 to 15 minutes a day can help you make progress.
Change the names of the documents so you can identify them and search for them easier.
Just like with paper files, you should periodically review your documents and delete the ones you no longer need. Files that served you last year may no longer be relevant this year.
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