four easy steps to a cleaner desktop

Peo­ple use their com­puter desk­top in count­less dif­fer­ent ways.  My uncle uses his to store short­cuts to all of the appli­ca­tions that he uses reg­u­larly.  Sev­eral of my friends pre­fer to keep theirs entirely bar­ren, pre­fer­ring instead to work out of fold­ers buried some­where deep in the com­puter.  I had a man­ager once that insisted all of the files and fold­ers on my com­puter should be arranged alphabetically..

Per­son­ally, I’ve always treated the desk­top as a work area and tend to group files con­tex­tu­ally or by project. Hav­ing groups of files directly in view helps me keep tabs on what I’m try­ing to accom­plish and keep­ing them grouped log­i­cally sig­nif­i­cantly sim­pli­fies the task of find­ing them when you need them.

The Achilles heel of this sys­tem though is when things get busy and I stop orga­niz­ing my files.. This is when I know I’ve taken on too many projects. If you expe­ri­ence the same thing, this arti­cle is for you..

The last sev­eral days have been com­plete and utter bed­lam for me, and this evening I real­ized why.   Upon a quick review of my desk­top I found this unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter; full of files and snip­pets of par­tially com­pleted and stalled projects. In a word, unmanageable.

So, what to do about this?

The obvi­ous answer is, fin­ish a few projects. But what if this isn’t possible?

1. Start by delet­ing any unnec­es­sary files
2. File any­thing that you don’t need imme­di­ate access to in your ‘doc­u­ments’ folder
3. Orga­nize the remain­ing files in to log­i­cal groups.   This will be dif­fer­ent for every per­son, do what works best for you whether it be alpha­bet­i­cal, chrono­log­i­cal or by color of icon.

On occa­sion, if I know I’ve got a few ongo­ing projects that need to be orga­nized I’ll take one addi­tional step that helps keep me in check.

4. Cre­ate a desk­top back­ground in an image edit­ing pro­gram like PC Paint or Adobe Pho­to­shop (or Pixlr)  with dividers between which you’ll store your work­ing files and fold­ers.  I use smaller boxes to limit the num­ber of files I can store for a par­tic­u­lar project (thus lim­it­ing the amount of unfin­ished work I will allow for each).  Label each box to enforce a place for every­thing and don’t for­get to leave your­self a sand­box where you can place files through­out the day while you’re deal­ing with them..  I try to ensure that my sand­box is empty at the end of the day to make my life eas­ier the next morning!

A few addi­tional notes:

• To find the size of your desktop
  • In Win­dows: right-click the desk­top and choose prop­er­ties and click the set­tings tab to see the screen resolution
  • On a Mac: Open the dis­plays pref­er­ences panel and click the dis­play tab to find the res­o­lu­tion for your cur­rent monitor
• Con­sider cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple desk­top arrange­ments for dif­fer­ent groups of tasks or addi­tional screens

I’d love to hear your thoughts!   How do you orga­nize your desk­top, and does this sys­tem work for you?