college

Organize, Please… School Documents!

I’ve discussed a little bit about how I’m a little OCD about how I organize my laptop.
Because the semester is beginning to pick up speed (already, I know), I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to share just how detailed I organize my documents.
But first, I want to say something to Microsoft Office– PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE create a “tag” function for documents!!!  Sometimes I need to have a file in multiple locations and be able to edit one and have it change in each spot.  Labels/Tags would totally fix that situation.

Okay, so here’s my document section.  Notice that there aren’t many folders.  I hate hate hate clutter.  Also of note, everything is capitalized.  And no abbreviations!

Inside my Georgetown folder- I have folders for Crew, TGP, Semesters, Internship (with subfolders for each internship), and Misc.  [CP side note: Misc. is abbreviated here ONLY because I have another folder labeled Miscellaneous and don’t want to confuse them– see above.]
Misc. holds all of my overarching “Georgetown” files.  Examples: Resumes, information about my major, graduation requirements, etc.

Okay, inside the Semesters folder is each semester labeled accordingly.
I’m going to take you through the inside of Fall 2010 now:

Each class has it’s own folder.

Within each class, I break out into different folders depending on what the document is.  This is how I broke up my Management Information Systems’ documents.  Some files are not placed in a folder because they’re for the entire class.

How do I label individual folders?  I never have a word start with a lower case letter.  Since all these files were for one project, they started with the same chunk of words, but then a number was added to differentiate them.  Another example of this is if I’m labeling lecture notes, I’ll start Lecture Notes XX/XX/XX and add the date.
I can’t tell you how much easier this makes searching and finding documents.  I never lose documents.  Ever.  I would NEVER leave a document “Untitled.”
This is the system that works for me… and it takes a little bit of time to correctly save a file, but the payoff in the end is huge.  I can easily search for a document from freshman year with no problem at all!
Do you have a similar system?
xoxo

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20 Comments

Southern Charm

Yes! And although it make take forever clicking through all the files, I know where all of my assignments and notes are. Its so much better than going through a stack of papers.

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Holly

We actually have very similar ways of organizing things! Like.. freakishly similar. I might do a post on this sometime or something. Love the idea of having all your semesters in one folder called Semesters though – mine were just in my main school folder and drive me crazy!

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Royar

Yes except that I have a folder with everything for the year located on my desktop so it's always in reach, along with folders for big projects I'm working on. I'm super OCD about organizing and it totally does work!

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Alex

We are almost identical in organizing–my folders look exactly the same and are divided the same.

organizing like this makes things so much easier!

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Katrina

I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who has folders within folders within folders that all contain specifically labeled documents that my friends think is borderline OCD. Your post is a work of art!

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Ruthie

I did the same thing in college! I do not know how people have a bunch of stuff on their desktop, it drives me NUTS!

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Jenny

Have you tried the Evernote app? It's a great way to organize–especially things you see on the internet. You download the app and then the Safari app which adds a little elephant icon to Safari. When you're on a site you like, you just click the elephant and it creates an Evernote Note for it. You can make your own notes, lists, and recordings too.

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R. Williams

That tagging idea is simply BRILLIANT! The design team at R. Williams always wants to save things in multiple files… A single picture might go in "Color Inspiration" as well as "Pattern Inspiration" and "Vintage Finds"…. having an option like that would fix everything!

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Caley-Jade Rosenberg

WOW! Judging by the comments, looks like we are all a bunch of VERY organised girls! I have the same folders on my Mac except my folders have now extended to Household, Wedding and Uni folders:)

P.S. Love the blog (from a new follower) x

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Katie

A bit different because I use google docs once a semester is over, and just upload everything. But pretty much the same!

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Charity

I do the very same thing…lol!:) I also use Dropbox as to avoid losing something. Most of my previous years of schoolwork are in a zip file and once you open the zip it's labeled by quarter/semester

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CANADA

YOU ARE INSANE

WE CANADIANS ARE CONCERNED FOR YOUR MENTAL WELL BEING

I SUGGEST BREATHING, IT MAKES THINGS BETTER

GOOD LUCK AND STAY STRONG YOU YANKEE

BEST WISHES,

CANADIAN GEESE

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