The Art of Digital Organization: Strategies and Systems for Taming the Chaos
I started writing this as a small post for LinkedIn, and as I started writing, it became a lot bigger.
If you're looking for a quick read or just some quick tips and tricks, this article may not be suitable for you. If you cant count the number of items on your desktop in 3 seconds, then this article is most definitely for you. Digital organization is a complex subject that requires a significant investment of time to master and fully understand. As such, this article aims to provide an in-depth explanation on how to effectively organize your digital life.
Here is what I have learned over the past decade about digital file organization from my time at a post production house in NYC where my team processed over 20TB of footage daily, to managing almost 20TB of my own personal data, to being involved with so many different areas of interest, to helping several people manage their digital files.
One thing I can say for sure, I’m not the biggest fan of how programmers organize their files. There is a method and reason for why certain files must be located in certain places; and most of the time they use search to find what they need anyways. I’m definitely not a fan of how a lot of artists organize their files either. That is just too much chaos.
Seriously. The number of times I have seen a desktop with more than a hundred items on it is one too many to count. I get it though, the desktop is a working space. It’s like a table. The problem is that we never have any time to clean it off because we are working all the time.
A feature was introduced on macOS a while ago that ‘collapses’ all of your files on the desktop for you ,which is nice; it allows you to metaphorically “see the floor and walk around”, but the mess is still there, lurking beneath the surface.
Here is my first tip: Create a folder on your desktop right now called “Sort”
Throw every loose file or folder that does not have to be on the desktop, into this folder right now!
This is going to do two things.
Contain the chaos into one single folder.
Mentally clear up space
Sure, we just crammed everything into the closet or under the bed, but at least you can walk on the floor and it looks clean! Anybody else do that as a kid? Throw everything under the bed, in the closet, or even under the blanket, hoping our parents would never notice? I know I did. Sure we eventually get caught, but the rest of this article will help to address that issue.
Process Overview
“Digital organization is extremely challenging but absolutely necessary to function. ”
Step 1: Contain the chaos.
Step 2: Categorize and sort the data. (This is arguably the most difficult step)
Step 3: Improve and condense the system.
Step 4: Adapt and create new systems.
Step 1: Containing the Chaos
• Do you have a lot of data? Over 500GB, at least 1TB, more than 5TB?
• Do you have a hard time figuring out how to categorize and organize all of these files?
• Do you work in 3D or the Film industry?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then this part of the process is necessary and might be a little painful to do, but I promise it will all be worth it in the end!
It’s hard to know what you need access to all the time. How often do you need these files? In the home organization field there is a trick you can do with your wardrobe. you hang all of your clothes on the hangers, and put the hanger backwards on the bar. instead of putting it on so the end of the hanger hook point to the wall, you put the hanger on so the end of the hook points towards you. Then wear an item, and put it back, you flip the hanger back to normal. Then at the end of the year you see which items are still hung backwards. Those are the items to get rid of.
Now when it comes to the digital realm, you don’t want to get rid of them, but out of sight, out of mind is really helpful! over the next few weeks you can see how many times you have to search the ‘sort’ folder in order to find or use something. An alternative would be to offload that sort folder onto an external drive.. Over the next month or so, you will see how often you have to plug it in to access your files. Unplug the hard drive and replug it in every time you need to search or are done accessing the items. This annoying obstacle will help you figure out how often you really need these files. if you have to go in everyday, then possible it would be a good idea to drag those back to the desktop, or leave them there in the first place. Unfortunately for those of us that work in the video post production field, you most likely will be accessing these drives daily.
When you can go a week or even month without needing to access that drive, then you know those files can stay there. Hopefully, having this ‘cleared’ up space brought more positive feelings than negative ones and if not, over the next few weeks it will become more clear as to how much this actually did for you.
If you only followed the first tip, then you may notice an issue, only the desktop chaos was contained. We also need to contain the downloads folder, the documents folder, any other folders with significant data; and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we also need to contain the chaos on all of your external drives, including the files in the cloud…🙈
I bet most of you do not realize how chaotic this has gotten over the years. The longer you have been doing this, the crazier the chaos gets. The more projects you work on, the crazier it becomes.
We will take this one step at a time. Spring cleaning happens once a year for a reason. There is a lot to be done, and we will go room by room together. The goal here is to clean one “room”, the desktop, and then use this clean area to store items from other areas until those areas are clean.
The Sort Folder
The folder that contains all of our digital items is permanently located on my desktop, allowing us to quickly access and drag and drop any necessary files. However, we must also consider what other items should be kept on the desktop aside from our sort folder. In the past, when my desktop became cluttered, I used to select all the loose and unnecessary items and create a new folder labeled "sort+whatever the date was." Although I occasionally still use this method, I only do so when I need access to a few files but cannot justify keeping them on the desktop.
But what is the purpose of creating these sorted date folders? Imagine walking into a storage unit filled to the brim with loose items. It would be challenging to find anything, right? However, if you walked into a storage unit with ten large boxes, you could more easily locate what you're looking for. Subconsciously, when I make these sorted date folders, I have a better idea of what is grouped together. I may not remember which file is in which folder, but there's a good chance I'll remember what items are grouped together. This makes searching for files much faster.
Think about the last time you went grocery shopping. Did you watch the cashier bag all of your items, or did you use self-checkout and bag them yourself? When you arrived home and unloaded the groceries, you may have remembered that you slipped a Snickers bar into the same bag as the cereal boxes. This makes it much easier to find the chocolate, as you can also search for the cereal.
This is one of the advantages humans have over computers. Computers search for the exact item, while humans can search for grouped items. Although computers can search faster than humans, they cannot find something if the human doesn't know the filename. This could be because the person was too lazy to change it when downloading it from the internet. However, with advancements in Machine Learning and artificial intelligence, it is now 2023 and you can type "dog" into your photos app, and almost every photo of a dog (and only a few random food photos) will appear.
What belongs on the desktop?
This is a great question and will look different to everyone. As mentioned, the Sort folder should probably stay on the desktop. For students this should be a super easy thing to figure out. Each course you are taking should get it’s own folder. Even if there are no digital files for this course. The idea here is to say, “Hey I’m important and you should be thinking about me.” Yes, even if it’s a billiards or archery class. Your desktop should be a representation of what the current season or time in your life looks like.
Here are the folders on my desktop: Website, Resume, Sort, 112CANON, logic 2023 music transfer, hidden title 1, hidden title 2.
The hidden folders have names that I cannot publicly talk about. The bold folders always stay on my desktop, the other ones are things I’m currently working on, but will move when complete.
That’s it. That is all that’s on my desktop. The idea here is for it to be simple. You want to look at your desktop and make two decisions, Am I working on something on the desktop or not? If yes, go to folder. If no, go to documents.
When you have a desktop with more than 8 folders, that’s when it gets really hard to see and quickly find things. I know some of you may think that the extra time it takes to look at 2 more folders might be worth it, but the speed I’m talking about is instantaneous non cognitive brain thought.
I still remember the first time I came across this idea. It was third grade and Mrs. Unzicker had us build a spaceship out of cardboard and asked us to bring in things to make it more authentic. My teacher put me in charge of the cockpit buttons and told me to do some research. Secretly I think she just wanted me to read more, but my take away from it was that she wanted me to build an actual cockpit. Naturally I went to the library and checked out a ton of books. Most of them I did not understand, and a lot of them had nice big pictures. The one thing I remember though was seeing a picture of a space shuttle and arrows and overlays on the photo, which I thought was really cool at the time, I don’t remember what it actually said, but the gist of it was that in designing complex machines, the goal is make things appear naturally where a human would think it should appear. The big red button is the stop button, etc.
Step 1 Conclusion: We want to gather all files that need to be sorted into one central location. Into our “Sort” folder.
Step 2: Categorization and Sorting the Data
As I mentioned earlier, this is the hardest part. Each persons clutter will look different. Not everyone works in the same field either. So there are some fundamental bigger picture items we need to address first before we get into the details.
I have rewritten this section numerous times to find the best approach, and I believe I have found it. A house. Your digital files are like a house and organizing them should be similar to organizing a house…except it’s all digital.
A house is made up of several rooms.
Each room is divided into zones.
Each zone has some sort of furniture.
Each furniture has some sort of item.
An item can contain other items.
This is the basic structure of a house, and thus should look similar to the structure of your digital files on a computer.
The house is obviously the computer. The rooms represent the big folders on your hard drive. Are we in the kitchen or living room? Is comparable to are we in the desktop or the documents folder? what kind of zones or big category folders do you want? Earlier I mentioned what should go on the desktop. Each folder represents a zone.
So in the kitchen, there are the fridge, sink, stove, and pantry. On my desktop I have Website, Resume, Sort, 112CANON, logic 2023 music transfer, hidden title 1, hidden title 2. The website is my fridge. the resume is the stove, the sort folder is obviously the pantry. The 112Canon folder is clearly the box I brought out from the closet and placed on the counter several weeks ago and have been too lazy to put away. I think you get the point.
Some rooms have zones dedicated to storage, like a bookshelf. Each shelf can be it’s own folder, with numerous items in each, but they are all contained under the category of bookshelf. This brings us to our first big ticket organization.
Big Picture:
First, lets make the distinction between physical and digital.
insert pic of physical box and digital box
I don’t think that needs any further explanation other than we are categorizing the two things so that we can focus on just the digital aspect. Now when it comes to our own digital assets, we can further separate these categories. Our physical items are our computer, external drives, SD cards, and flash drives. Any physical item that holds our data. Everything else is most likely stored in the cloud. I consider anything that is not on our physical devices to be in the cloud. This includes any type of data where we must use some sort of interface to access it. Emails, Google Drive, Dropbox etc.
In order not to cause any confusion I will leave it at that.
Insert pic of physical and digital that puts hardware in the physical and cloud in the digital along with data. more of a left right ‘pro/con’ list
I think this was pretty easy to understand, but needed to be said to start this visual picture we should have of our digital data.
For now lets talk only about the computer and leave external devices, phones, and tablets for later; as I view this only as ‘we have a computer’ and we have storage. where that storage is located is a topic to be discussed later in this artlicle.
Painting out the vision and layout for structure on a computer
Our computers usually have a few places to store data. The three biggest being the Desktop, Documents, and Downloads folders. We can create as many different folders as we want, however this is where we want to limit the creation of folders. If you navigate to the base of your computer you might see something like “Macintosh HD” within this, you will see Applications, Library, System, Users. Most people will not need to access anythin except the Usuers folder. This will contain your user and a shared folder. Whatever the name of your user account is, will contain several folders. in addition to the big three mentioned earlier, you might also see Music, Movies, Picture, Public.
Now if you see more folders there, this isnt necissarily a bad thing. This varies depending on what you do, and what sort of applications you have on your computer. But again the big three, Desktop, Documents, and Doanloads are the three biggest areas. Think of this like the Living Room, Kitchen, and Dining Room. The big shared areas of the house where a lot of clutter tends to end up.
The downloads folder is really more like the entryway or garage of the home. it’s the access point to the internet, as far as the default location for files to be downloaded to. I consider this to be a staging area.
The Desktop is the living room. when in doubt, put stuff here has been the motto of almost everyone. It’s easy to see, its easy to access. When you are a guest in someone elses house, you really only feel comfortable wherever they put you which is most likely the living room. This is probably the most cluttered place for a lot of people.
Now that’s not to say the documents folder is any better, but this is where I see a lot of failure points in the organization process. Here is the biggest way to tell if the documents folder is out of control. If you open the default finder window, navigate to documents; if you have to scroll, then you have too many folders. As I’m writing this, I am guilty of this too. I need to clean up my documents folder a bit. I have three folders greater than the default view. and really, I want the last spot to be free so I can visually see and instantly know that this is everything that I have.
I considered writing this article talking about file structre backwards, so I could reveal the big secret, but it just didnt make sense. So here it is. One of my biggest and best tips to organization
Category Folders:
What is a category folder? A category folder, as I define it, is the big bins to place common items. In a home this could be seen as Furniture, Electronics, Decorations, Dishes etc. What are some good categories to have, and how should we name them?
on my computer, here are the big category items i have in my documents folder. 3D, Audio, calibrate, Life, Mini, Projects, Software. The most important thing here is to name these folders using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS as this denotes a “big category” item.
It is easy to put certain folders into a hierarchy, or order that makes sense.
With a hierarchy, Project files usually go inside of a project folder. you could even have common folders like audio, video, photo, inside of every single one of you individual video project folders. the thing that distingushes client 1 audio from client 2 audio, is that the folder called audio for client 1 is inside of the folder for client 1 and vice versa.
With an order there is “Sort by name” where the folders are sorted numerically first, then alphabetically. How would you sort everything alphabetically, with the exception of the folder called zebra? well you could put a ‘1’ in front of the name on that folder. There are other variations that we will discuss later on. but putting a number in front of the name will place it above a folder called ‘Andrew’
Going back to the home analogy, the idea here is to be able to walk into a room and instantaneously know where everything is. When you walk into your living room, you know where the couch is without having to think about it.
Even if you do not know where a specific item is, you should be able to follow a system or formula into being able to figure out exactly where the item is. If you are give the task of frying an egg in a house you have never been in before, I guarantee you can easily figure it out using a system / formula.
open front door.
find kitchen (kitchens are usually on the first floor somewhere near a dining room and living room.)
locate stove
frying pan most likely is nearby
locate fridge
food items should be in fridge
So without thinking too much of where a specific item is, I can easily find items or at least get really close to it. I will say though, finding silverware is one of the most challenging things in kitchens you have not been in before. Like if someone gave me $1,000 if i could find a fork or the eggs. I would put my money on the eggs. (Although, with the eggs-travagant prices of eggs lately, maybe there wont be any eggs).
If I needed to find a random sound that I recorded years ago, I know exactly where to go. Go to my Documents Folder, locate the AUDIO folder then navigate to Recorded Sounds. At this point I can turn my brain “on” and actually figure out where the file is.
So for me, the way my brain works is like this:
Hey, I need an audio file that I recorded.
Now, while my brain is catching up to the thought “Where is it”
I have already opened a finder window, clicked on Documents, and clicked on AUDIO instinctively.
Think about in the middle of the night if you have to go to the bathroom, your body can do it for you without having to put much cognitive thought processing into it because this is something you do all the time. This is the goal behind setting up the category bins.
It is totally fine to have a non category folder next to a category folder. My documents folder could look something like this: 3D. Adobe. AUDIO. BUSINESS, CALIBRATE, emojis, LIFE, Mind Maps, MINI, PROJECTS, SOFTWARE, Worksheets, Zoom.
You will notice three different types of folders here. ALL CAPS, Capital Start Letter, all lowercase.
ALL CAPS: Category Bin Folders
Capital Start Letter: Subject bin folders
all lowercase: misc or uncategorizable, but still need quick access to.
You may be wondering why I have a folder called emojis when they are native to devices or web based apps. Well if any of you use Slack for work or school. You can add your own emojis. My favorite one is the meow_party. I mean come on, how fun is that!
The Details:
Category Folders are great because they categorize certain types of data, but not all the data needs to be in the same place. For example Having an AUDIO folder on my computer tells me that this is the place where all of my audio related data lives. What do i do if it is not there? Well I plug in my external hard drive and go to the AUDIO folder that lives on that drive. The Category folders can live in multiple places on various drives, but do not need to contain the same projects within it. What about duplicates though?
Well this brings us to the next big thing which how do we handle duplicates? This is a great question! For starters, it is always better to have a duplicate than to have 1 corrupted file.
Backups and cloud storage are great ways to avoid this, but how can we know which files to use.
in the case of a photo, when we have duplicates, they will be the same. but if its a photoshop file thats duplicated, this does not mean it is the same. you may have changed things about one of the files, but not the other. Most likely you will need to manually check. This is a process that takes a long time.
Step 2 Conclusion:
Step 3: Improving and Condensing the Categories
Step 3 Conclusion:
Step 4: Adapt and Create Systems
Not every recommendation here, or any organization tip will neccessarily work for you. I definitely recommend trying them, seeing what works and what doesn’t and then modifying or moving to the next system.
Something I have learned over the years is that something might work for a production company, but might not work for me. Now there is a difference in going away from a standard file structure vs making modifications. For example: I used to sort all of my photos by year, month, day. But with programs like Adobe Bridge, I can filter through the photos and it’s not as important as it is having all of my Waterfall photos together so I can see them next to each other.
The interesting thing, is that I used to do that, but I reached a threshold where I had to switch to the sort by date folders. I stayed with that for 3 years before reaching another threshold where I had to switch back.
Some people might take away from this that the system I switched back to was better. But the nuance is tricky to see. For example, I use a sleep app to collect dat, because I love data and what I found out is that the steps I took in a single day affected my sleep. Anything more than 4,000 steps but less than 12,000 steps would give me the best sleep. So a System might be perfect for certain thresholds and not work for others. y
You may discover that the organization you use in your first, second, and fourth year of college is perfect, but in your third year, a different system is needed. This can be confusing because it makes us doubt our original system, we find a better version, then go back to it later. Is one really better than the other? Or is it that was the best system to use at the time.
It’s like cooking. Sure a non-stick pan is great, but some food cannot cook in non-stick pans. You need a non, non stick pan to cook certain food like peanut butter fudge.
Step 4 Conclusion:
intro
I absolutely love organization, and it’s just as important to have your digital files organized as it is to have your physical items organized. Am I the most organized person? Absolutely not. Are all of my files perfectly organized? No. But I do have good tips and general advice that might be helpful, especially for artists. Why should you continue read? what gives me any authority to speak on this subject? I am a visual mapper. I need to be able to know where things are, not just that they exist. I worked at a video post production house in New York City where we processed roughly 20 TB of footage daily of episodic content. This was just for the team I worked on. Other teams/coworkers worked on movies and commercials. I learned a significant amount about dealing with a large amount of data daily. Mapping this out in my mind took time as we had 20 shows located on several different servers. Each show had various part and highly specific locations where things needed to be. I am unsure of how much I can speak on their specific workflow and organization, so it’s better to play it safe. And lastly I have had to adjust my organizational skills as my own data has grown from 4GB at the end of high school to almost 20TB of digital files.
Sometimes, organization seems absolutely ridiculous and extremely redundant. Take for example someone purchaseing a dresser drawer to only put one sock in one of the drawers. Why is that necessary? It doesn’t seem like it, but when new socks come into the picture, you now know where to put them. And this is really the whole point. Organizing for your current digital artwork or files may not help you down the road when all of a sudden you go from creating 10 gb of data a year, to 10 tb a year.
There are different methods for organizing and there are different systems for all. Sometimes modifying a system will do wonders!
Let’s talk about data.
I know some data scientists or programmers will come after me for saying this, but having everything in one folder and running a search for the one you need is not helpful for anyone except the computer, or a shopper that knows exactly what theyre looking for. (One of the things I have against online shopping, but that is an article for another day) The biggest thing is that, you don’t know what you don’t know. This means that if a file you saved is labeled ‘ksdjfhsksei_1.jpg’ how will you find that, and or know where to look for it when its thrown into a folder with over 10,000 items.
Have I looked through folders like this to find a missing file….sadly yes. Your future self always pays the price for your past self. (can i claim my past self as a dependant for taxes if im always paying for him?)
For any of the other organization nerds out there like me, I’m sure you have seen The Home Edit on Netflix, they have a saying/motto that goes like this: “Edit. Categorize. Contain” There is so much wisdom in this. If you havent seen the show, you should def check it out!
I would change the Edit, to Sort, but its really the same thing. The first thing you want to do is to cort all of your files. This is going to come in three big steps.
You need a sorting bin (or folder) I literally have a folder on my desktop called “Sort” The idea behind this folder is to throw anything that you want to sort later, into this folder. I used to create folders with dates like “Sort_20190922” dictating the week/day i sorted files into it.
1. This will cleanup your desktop
2. This will give you a space to be messy and unorganized
3. This will let you slowly gather similar files you wish to put into a folder together. Remember the sock analogy? What’s the point in sorting one sock into a drawer, but over time as you gather more socks, or in our case digital files, you will be able to start making matches and pairs. For example. I got into 3D printing and started downloading a bunch of files to print. Pretty easy to categorize when you can clearly see
insert shape diagram
Ideally at the end of the year, or whenever you get time to sort your files, you would take the time to sort these out.
1. Date Formatting.
The most efficient way to format a date is the four digit year, followed by the two digit month, followed by the two digit day.
common
Typically (in America) when asked to give a date like date of birth, it’s always the month then day, then year. The only argument I see for this is if you drop the year, and it is month, then day. We all exist at the same time together within the year. So most of the time when someone says, “Whens your birthday?” They are not asking for your date of birth. They want to know when in this year is your birthday. Which most of the time you would proceed with saying the month then day “5/13” so May 13th. Or if you are like me, you would respond with, “Why do you want to know.. 👀”
modified
5132023 is a hard number to read and it doesn’t make sense.
First, lets modify this so that it is a two digit month, then a two digit day, then a four digit year. 05132023 ….Ew. I hate it. Now if it was 12252023. Slightly better, but still confusing. For those of you that use this method for date writing, I’m going to tell you why it is weird. Imagine you are waiting in line at the grocery store, and the self check out lanes are closed. You are purchasing eggs, bread, and milk. (so naturally you plan on spending $50 -inflation amiright). The cashier puts the items in the bag in an order that made no sense to you. They put the eggs in first, followed by the bread, followed by the milk. If you’re asking why anyone would put the milk on top of the bread, that’s exactly what I’m asking!?! The biggest item needs to go first! the four digit year needs to go first. Not only is it the biggest item, its the longest item, and its the item we do not need to pay attention to.
Think about a long string of numbers… 12984732923856294832454689321. Can you quickly, within a split second tell me what number is the middle of this?
Let’s look at the number again. 05132023.
let’s look at it again, but without the year. 0513 - see with this I can easily tell whats the bigger number and whats the smaller number. 05 is the bigger number and 13 is the smaller number. Okay, it’s not the smaller number, but it’s the number that changes most! Let’s look at time for a second. I think most of us understand that when it is the 7th hour during the 36th minute and 42nd second it is 7:36:42. This makes sense because when the seconds reach the end of their loop, it changes the one next to it, and when the minute gets to the end, the hour changes. So the slowest number should be first. 05-13. The slower moving number should come first. Imagine reading a clock like 42:07:36….
The final reason why the year must come first.
Lets compare some dates
05132023
05142023
05152023
05162023
When my eyes look at this it is really hard to see the difference. Now if it was more like this:
20230513
20230514
20230515
20230516
I can instantaneously see which number is changing!
Again lets get a little more tricky.
a - 05132021
b - 05132022
c - 05132023
d - 05142023
e - 05152021
f - 05162023
g - 05172023
h - 05182021
i - 05182023
j - 05192023
k - 05202023
L - 05212023
a - 20210513
e - 20210515
h - 20210518
b - 20220513
c - 20230513
d - 20230514
f - 20230516
g - 20230517
i - 20230518
j - 20230519
k - 20230520
L - 20230521
now wait a sec….that’s not what I want….I now have the issue of months being the priority over years. I could have a file from 2020 next to a file from 2021. When I sort my folder by alphatical, I run into issues. Here is how it should look using the same months:
2. Categories and Nesting Folders
Again, it’s hard to know you need this when it’s just you, and when your data is not a lot.
Imagine living with a roommate, it can be easy to tell what’s yours and what’s theirs. However when you increase the number of roommates and you live together for years, some things can become blurry as to who bought that muffin tin. Let’s add kids into the mix. I can only speak for my nephews and nieces. I cannot tell whos sock is whos, or which toy belongs to which child. I have a grasp of what’s mine, but now we are starting to get into a territory that becomes trickier. I have heard of parents that have a large number of kids, like 10 kids, will color code each child. it might be hard to tell which jacket belongs to which child, but the orange tagged jacket belongs to child number 4, etc.
It can be easy to contain our files in a folder, but as more and more similar looking folders pop up, it becomes more difficult. This is why category folders are great! In this instance I might use a school analogy. You could be taking 4 courses in a semester. You probably wouldn’t put all of your school related files just in a giant folder called school….at least I hope not. Please tell me you don’t do that 🙈
You probably have a folder for each course you might be taken in a given semester. Then within that folder you might have some other folders relating to the weeks, or modules or projects given in the course. It really depends on the type of course you are taking. As someone that had a lot of project based courses back at uni, a lot of my courses have folders for projects. Now here is where the artist might relate to the pain that is unorganization. Demo Reels and Portfolios. The bane of all of us. Sometimes it’s hard enough to create the project, let alone disect it and show how we did it. The thing that makes this worse, is when you go back to the contents of a course from over 10 years ago and look at how unorganizes you were, it can be extremely unmotivating to find the work let alone showcase it. And when exactly did I take Digital Production? Was it in the spring or fall? Let me logon to mycourses (alumni account coming in clutch about now) let me scroll through all of this… Oh yeah, Spring.
So, for anyone in college right now, and anyone out of college, here is how I recommend organizing your folders.
All course content should go into it’s own folder with the name of the course
All courses from that semester should be in a folder for the semester
All semesters should be place into a folder for the year
I went to a school where we called each year by the year that you were at the school. First years, Second years, third years, etc A lot of programs were five years, but Im getting off topic
You can label your folder Year 01, Year 02.. or by the year you attended. 2012, 2013,2014 etc
We really lucked out that alphabetically, Fall comes first, followed by Spring, then Summer. So Fall will always be the first folder in the hierarchy
I know that some schools consider the summer term to be a header (beginning of the new school year) but sequentially this is how it happens
All years should be placed into a folder with the name of your school. This Categorizes the content by school. It is because of this folder, that the ones below it make sense. Otherwise you probably have a folder called school with all 34 courses you took. or separated by year etc
If you go to multiple schools, or you have content from high school, pursue your masters, phd etc. Your school folder can be placed inside of a folder called School.
In my school Category Folder, I have 3 folders.
RIT
TAMU
Other
High School
Transfer Credits
You can put anything else here too that may not be as prevalent but still want to associate with school like clubs
Doing this for your school Contains all of your school related Content in one place. This makes it easier when you need to go back to find something. Searching for it manually, or even searching for a file. Not that us humans would really notice a difference, but it is easier to search for a file in a folder of 500 items rather than 100,000 items. Navigating to your third year to search for a file and then type in the search to find it can be easier. Again, our computers are quite powerful, so that’s not the issue. If your sibling tells you to grab something for them, you know it will go faster if they tell you to search their closet as opposed to the entire house. This is more for mapping things in your brain. You don’t need to know where the item is exactly, but if you have a system in place, you are more likely to know where to look first.
And to all the people that only search for the specific file, sometimes what you need is near that file and you might not know you need that as well.
hard to adjust to this workflow until you work with large projects or processing roughly 20TB of footage a day for a studio • sometimes, it's better to number your folder so you can override the name convention and sort folders by name. • some projects (Music for me) are organized by month. I will have a "Beats 2022" folder and inside my folders would look like 00_Quick_Bounce 01_Jan 02_Feb ...
3. Multiple backups
are obvious, but organizing those multiple backups can be tricky • What happens when you constantly use those files, but have 2 drives and a cloud version of those files. Which one do you modify? • I personally use the method of putting backup versions in a folder called Archive. then I will have a folder titled the project name and then the date it was archived
4. Container Folders
I have a folder called "PEOPLE" where i create folders of friends or clients where I can put all of there things inside. • With this, I use ALL CAPS to signify a container folder • I can now have all of my external drives, and my computer have a folder in the documents called "PEOPLE" and this means I can have "Mark" and "Steve" on my computer, but have "Ezekiel" on an external drive that I do not need to have access to • Other container folders that I have, "CALIBRATE", "AUDIO", "3D", "PROJECTS", "SOFTWARE", "WORKSHEETS"...
5. Creating demo reels and showcasing work can be difficult because in a way you want that to be separate from the work files. • With small projects it's pretty easy. Here is how I organize video projects PROJECTS -> Project_Name -> Audio - all audio files Photos - any photos to add to the project Footage - all video footage - sometimes I will categorize them, but that is for larger projects Screenshots - anything from the edit that I want to screenshot Files - all premeire, after effects, photoshop, etc Exports - place exports here - tag most recent or best - also, date and version the file
Special thanks to the people I learned from over the years that made me better at digital file organization:
Mark Reisch & Atia Newman for teaching me version control and proper project file structures for complex 3D and visual effects
David Long and Ricki Figueroa for challenging me technically and dealing with complex data and so many charts
My undergrad roommates for helping me learn file structures for coding and software engineering (still a work in progress)
Home Organizing by Alejandra.tv for being my first deep dive into my passion for organization
The Home Edit because…well if you watch the show, you would understand.
