Not so long ago my wife came to me begging to help her find a file that she knew she had on her laptop, but that she could no longer find. Armed with patience I then sat at her computer and started running searches with whatever she thought was part of the title of her file. Nothing! Then I started searching by some keyword she suggested about the contents of the lost file. Nothing again! Finally I asked her what tool she used to generate that file and, surprise surprise, it was the omnipresent MS® Word.

So, I launched the program and started looking in the list of the latest opened documents. Nothing even there. The history had been wiped out because she kept opening one file after another in search for the missing one and, of course, the history only provides the last 10 opened files.

I finally started asking my wife about details of when she created the file, if she remembered where she put it, what was the purpose of that file, whether she created more than one version of it. After all that questioning, we were able to narrow down the search to a few folders until, finally, we found it.

It was hard, but it was necessary as that file contained an important document she needed at work the very next day.

I just hope this event helped my wife learn an important lesson: computers hard drives are big, and you can put a lot of stuff in it. But the more you store in it, the more it becomes difficult to retrieve your things back, unless you start thinking like a librarian.

Oh my… what am I doing now? A preach on the goodness of keeping things well organized!!!

Well, yes, that’s what I’m doing. You see, with the big hard drive sizes we have available nowadays, we have the capacity to store as much information as a real public library, maybe even more. How do you think you are going to find your stuff if you don’t design a method for storing and retrieving information? Failing to do so will inevitably bring you to the chaos, to the moment when you won’t be able to easily find anymore what you are looking for.

You know, this is a well understood concept among those companies that want you to use the computer for everything you do every day. And they help you on this task by providing for free some tools that simplify the search for something missing. Think at the search capabilities of MS Windows®, or the Google® search that you can install on your own computer to easily find stuff on it.

Are these tools really the answer to all the problems? Maybe yes, maybe not. If you use your computer only occasionally and you name your files with very creative names all quite different from each other, then yes, these tools help you out. But if you start having different files with similar names and worst, different files with similar names and similar contents, how are you going to distinguish one from another in the long run?

Organization is the only key. And all the computers have the one tool to make you succeed in your quest for the data organization. This tool is called file system. Start with your Documents, or MyDocuments, or whatever you want to call it, folder. Don’t put all your files in this folders regardless of what they refer to. Create other folders within this main folder using meaningful names. Some people use to name these folders with the year when the documents were created. Other people names them into categories. Then, in each of this second level folders, create more folders, with more specific names. And so on and so on, until you reach the point where the file name itself becomes the most meaningful object at that level, so you finally start putting files in this lower level folders. It will be easier, later, to navigate the folders depending on the thing you are looking for, and you’ll find it in no time.

Think of it as family tree. Well, this method of organizing is actually called a tree. Why? Look at the graphical representation of it. Doesn’t it look like an upside down tree?

Organized tree

Can you feel how easy it would be to find things in it? Don’t let the programs put the saved files wherever they decide. Be in control! You decide where to put a saved file. Everything becomes so easy.