Organization … Documents

I have never been big on New Year’s resolutions. My attitude has always been that “today is the first day of the rest of my life.” I was horrified, today, to realize today that I have not published a post for over a month; nearly six weeks in fact. So, I have resolved to publish a blog post every day that I am not working. And no, I am not waiting until the 1st of January to begin. Which, of course, makes organization the obvious subject today.

That covers a lot of things, so today I will talk about photographs and documents. There is no single way to manage these items, but you do need to maintain a system that works for you. And, while I am referring here to electronic copies, the same principles apply to the originals as well. This can be a daunting task, especially if you have a large number of items. But planning ahead will help. You don’t want to organize now and then have to re-organize later. Remember, your goal should be to make items easy to file and easy to find.

Here are my suggestions, but see also this article on organization from WikiHow:

• Create your categories. Here, I would suggest one category for documents and another for pictures.
• Create subcategories. For documents, these could include birth, marriage and death, while for pictures they could be for people and places. Don’t be afraid to add further subcategories.
• Give the folders understandable names (think of them as labels) so that you know what they contain and can find them again. Color coding is a good idea too, but unfortunately you cannot do that in Windows without using 3rd-party software.
• Do not put files on your desktop, except for temporary storage.