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A friend received a brand-new computer as a gift, and as I helped him to set it up and get started working with it I noticed that it automatically saved his work into pre-determined places. All of the pages he wrote with the word-processor (or exported from Excel or prepared with PowerPoint) got saved in a folder called My Documents; anything from the MP3 player went by default into My Music, photos into My Pictures, and video clips were saved into My Movies. I never found exactly where his emails got stored, but I suspect somewhere lurks a folder called My Mail.

I predict that after a few weeks, this friend will find hundreds of items in his My Documents folder, hundreds in My Mail, and a few in Music and Movies. When he goes to locate the handout he prepared last week for his fourth-period history class, he'll find himself lost in long list of documents, scrolling slowly in a search for what he needs. There must be a better way to organize the files he will use in his professional and personal life.

Bottles and cans

Putting all your documents together in one place, your mail in another, and your pictures somewhere else is for most people not the best form of organization. Imagine at home, if you put all your bottles in one cupboard, all your cans in another, and all your boxes in a third place. When it came time to spray the ant's nest in the garage, you'd find the can of Raid stored between green beans and the motor oil. When you reached for the shampoo on the way to the bathroom, you'd take care not to grab the olive oil. And to salve the cut on your finger, you might confuse the box of Band-Aids with the package of Post-It notes.

In our homes, most of us store things where they are needed, according to their function: cooking utensils stand together on the kitchen counter, while screwdrivers stay in the garage. And for most of us, this same form of organization should apply to our computers. If we teach a class in history during fourth period, we should place all of its files in a single folder called Fourth Period History. In here should go the handouts, the maps, the speeches, and the video clips we use in the course. If a student or a colleague sends us an email with a good suggestion for the course, we'd save it to this same folder. We might create a folder for each course, and another folder for our personal hobby, and another for the online course that we are taking.

Organizational schemes

On my computer you will find a folder called Boston University, and inside it a subfolder for each of my courses, another for my advisees, and one for each committee I am on. You'll also find a folder called Boat Stuff, and another called Cablevision. When I create or receive a file pertaining to one of these areas, I place it in the appropriate folder. When a folder contains so many items that things become difficult to find, I create subfolders and reorganize the files. When I need to find something, I look in the folder for that topic. The organization of my files reflects the aspects of my work.

Not everyone works this way. One colleague organizes by date: he keeps everything that people send him in his email program, and looks it up by when it was received. So when it's time to find a document on a given subject, he first looks in his date book to see when he last dealt with that topic, and then scrolls back in his email list to that day, and searches there for the file he needs. Another colleague has a folder for each person she works with, and places all relevant documents into the person's folder.

Saving gracefully

Few people organize their life and work in terms of Documents, Pictures, Movies, and Mail. These categories may make sense to computer manufacturers and software engineers, but not to teachers and students. So take some time to think through the categories of your occupations, and set up folders (and subfolders as necessary) for each one. then, when you go to save a document, pay careful attention: don't save in the default folder that the computer suggests automatically; save instead in the place where you are likely to find it again when you need it.

And give it a useful filename. Avoid names like map6.gif or history paper.doc or IMG_345YG.JPG. Rename the file as you save it, to something that will make sense later: Iraq Map 1967.gif, or Babylonian Culture.doc, or Grandma_at_the_Tiller.jpg.

The same goes for email messages and attachments: don't leave them in your email program; save them carefully (the ones that are worth saving) with a useful filename, into the folder for the project to which they pertain. Take some time in class to help your students find a suitable scheme for organizing their digital documents as well.

Finding it

So you saved that map of the Middle East somewhere in the Fourth Period History folder, but can't remember what you named it. But you do recall having found and saved it over Winter Break. Go to the Fourth Period History folder and click at the top of the window to list the files by date. Scroll down to the dates at the end of December and the beginning of January. There it is, mideastmap5.gif, last modified on December 30.

In like manner you can list the files within a folder by name, size (maps and videos and large photos are almost always much bigger than text documents), or file type (e.g., all jpeg images).

A place for everything, and everything in its place.