How do you best store digital things part 1

The next 3 posts will be dealing with storing digital things. While digital things take up less space than physical things, they still take up space and do need decluttering from time to time. I’ll be breaking them down into 3 areas, pictures, videos/music and today’s post, documents.

Storing things digitally is a wonderful advance. It gives us access, space to store things that would take up so much physical space. But it can create clutter and hassles if you’re not always on top of it and keeping things organized.

So today, we’re dealing with documents. PDFs, Word documents and things like that can take up a lot of space and can create lots of clutter. Think of your hard drive or storage device as a filing cabinet. The device holds things, but inside the device are individual folders that hold individual files, or ideas. So, how to store all of them? How best do you organize and operate in that organization? Is it by year? By type of document? By idea? However you best think and organize, set it up that way.

Some things have a certain “shelf life” or usefulness. If your ou meant has outlived its usefulness to you, delete it. Or if you know you’ll need access to it down the road, consider moving it to another file or another storage device so that you can access it later.

For me, I work best by ideas. For my job, I direct different musical groups. So my files are organized by group, then in each folder is a sub folder. I’m in the process of updating them and organizing them more, and what I’ll end up with is it broken down by year. Now, if your brain doesn’t work that way, then don’t do it that way. Figure out what works best for you and how you best process things and then go from there.

It will be a bit of work upfront to get things organized, but once you get organized, if you keep on top of it, you’ll find your life less stressed and you won’t be having to spend time looking for things.