How I Organize and Process Files on My Mac – Part 1

My mother has the messiest file system I have ever seen on a computer. I, being a savvy computer user myself, maintain the complete opposite: a slick file organization system. Let me explain.

Meet my mother: a few years ago, she was one of the few people in the entertainment industry who worked without email; a relic of an industry which used to rely solely on telephones. My mother’s lack of email was due to many things, including a fear of computers. So, on Mother’s Day, 2005, I forced her to conquer her fear. I gave her a computer, hoping to drag her (kicking and screaming) into the information age. She willfully agreed.

Present day: I travel a lot, and for a short while each time, I spend time with my mother. She greets me with a warm hug, a home cooked meal, and a bevy of computer questions. She wants me to help her fix her computer. Regularly. I willfully agree.

As I open her MacBook, and place my finger on the soft white power button, I hear the familiar chime of an Apple product coming back to life. The chime echoes my mother’s plea for help, and quickly guides me to the desktop. A horror is brought to my eyes: the desktop has become an endless black hole for random downloads, documents, and images.

Meanwhile, amidst this cluttered nightmare, I cannot find the hard drive. There seems to be a pile (not a Stack) of files where the hard drive would be. I start moving files left, down, another one left, a fourth one down, and so on. This process continues for more than 20 files. I turn to my mother as Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now: “the horror, the horror”.

It’s time for a cluttered file system makeover! Here’s how I work, and hopefully you, as well as my mother, will find some solace in the system I have learned, adapted, and put into place.

Start with an inbox. It’s that simple. Make sure everything that you download goes into this inbox. Additionally, any files that are not organized must go into this inbox as well. This is the place where you will process and delegate files to different places. If you can complete a task from the inbox, great! If not, delegate it to a different folder. The time length of files that exist here are 24 hours.

At first, I thought, all I needed was an inbox. The problem with that was the inbox began turning into an archive: files would never leave the inbox! So, make sure you constantly are clearing out your inbox, and for those files you want to keep longer, put them into an archive.

Create an archive. The archive will be for files that you don’t want to organize now, but will eventually be organized and currently do not need attention. Most of my completed design projects go into the archive in case clients need them after completion. The time length of files that exist here is 2 weeks.

Now that we have a system for items that are a day old, and 2 weeks old, what about the items that exist between those times? You need folders for items you are going to process.

Create the core process folders: “Read, Watch, Listen”, “Pending”, and “Current Projects”. Each folder has it’s own function and use:

Read, Watch, Listen: This folder is for all of the items that don’t need modification, but need my attention. This includes items to read, videos and images to watch, and audio to listen to. Items that I want to keep for longer than 2 weeks, for reference or entertainment, go into my hard drive for long term storage.

Pending: These items need attention and modification, but require something in the future. This includes items to send, files to upload, and documents that require modification from another person. As I write this article, all the images I capture, and eventually upload for this article are going into my “Pending” folder. Before they are ready to be uploaded, they will be stored in a folder called…

Current Projects: In this folder, I keep all my documents that I am going to modify, or am currently modifying. This includes all source material for each project. This article, as it goes through various drafts, is sitting in my “Current Projects” folder, along with all the accompanying images. All projects with groups of files go here. Pending is for single files which require action. Current Projects is for groups of files which require action.

With those folders, you have now created a dynamic filtering system for all your new documents. But you can go even further.

Stay tuned for the next part, where I will discuss how to filter, quickly access, and process through your data.

This article adapted from experience using this article at lifeclever, and looking at desktops at the GTD flickr group. Inbox icon from Optica Optima.

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