A month ago, when I asked Writing It Real subscribers if they would like an article on technical computer issues writers face, there was a big response. Almost all the comments were about hard drive organization:

Any tips you can give, sequentially and logically, to organize my hard drive would indebt me to you forever. My computer files look like the spare table where everything goes that I want to do something with someday but not now. I don’t know where my files are once they get out of my sight. HELP!

 The thought of organizing my work on my hard drive excites me. I didn’t even know I could do such a thing and I have so much all over. I’ve often thought of purchasing one of the writing programs to do this but haven’t a clue which one even after researching and reading. I would certainly appreciate an article on that.

 Yes, I’d love to know about organizing my work on the hard drive. In fact, I was thinking of buying an external hard drive, but finally found a computer techie who says I don’t need one — I just need to clean up what I have. None-the-less, I’d love to know more.

Why Organize
Writers create a lot of files over time and need to find the right ones when they are working and submitting. Making sure they don’t have extra versions scattered here and there all over the disk can save much time and confusion. If you’ve got four copies of “My First Day of Grad School” on your disk, you might find that the edits you make one day aren’t there the next time if you inadvertently open a different copy. This article is intended to help you understand and organize your hard drive so you can reduce clutter and find the documents you need.

 You’ve heard the maxim “a place for everything and everything in its place”. We are going to invent a system for your files where you will always know exactly where a file should be saved and where you can find it when you want to open it. The reason this is necessary is that you can’t depend on your memory to remember what you have and keep track of where it is. That’s not an insult to your memory abilities but rather a basic fact about our brains. Except for the rarest exception, human brains can only track about 80 –100 things of one type — beyond that, in order for you to track new things, you just naturally stop tracking the old. That’s why, if you sing in a choir with 60 people with a stable membership for 2 years, everyone knows everyone else. In a choir of 130, no one person knows everyone else.

How this pertains to the task at hand is that, as the number of your files grows beyond this basic mental limit, you have to rely on organization rather than memory.

A Basic Concept
Before we can discuss organization, there is a concept you need to understand — the difference between your hard drive and your computer’s memory. Here’s a useful analogy: your hard drive is like your personal library and filing system. A bigger hard drive means that you have more shelves and filing cabinets to store things. Your computer’s memory is like size of your brain. With more memory, a computer can hold more in its brain at one time. Hard drive = filing system, memory = brain. Having more memory means your computer can deal with more and larger tasks without having to run back and forth to the bookshelves to look things up over and over. Having a bigger hard drive means you can store more books, papers, emails and music cd’s without running out of shelf space.

We measure both hard drive size and memory size in bytes. A byte corresponds to one text character, the “e” in between the quotes takes up one byte of space on my hard drive. When I close my document, that byte plus the bytes that hold all the other characters and formatting choices in this document will be flushed out of the computer’s memory but will be stored on the hard drive. Think of it as closing a book and turning your full attention to your music practice. If you need the information from the book later, you’ll go to the shelf and open it to load it back into your brain.

The library or hard drive is measured in gigabytes (GB). One GB equals a billion bytes. That one GB can hold:

150,000 pages of text or
500,000 emails without attachments or
1000 high quality photographs or
16 hours of music or
1 hour of video.

How Full Is Your Drive?
In my experience, people don’t know how full their drives are but think they’re probably very near capacity. One common reason they think this is from seeing a message about the computer’s memory being too full and mistakenly thinking it meant their hard drive was too full. Another reason is that their computer sometimes runs slowly — this is also almost always a memory problem. People throw a lot of good stuff away either because of such misconceptions or because throwing things away is the only way they can think to clear away the clutter.

If you have your computer available, please take a moment to see how full your hard drive is right now.

For Windows: In the Start menu, go to My Computer. Right-click on the icon for the C: drive and choose Properties.

For Mac OS X: Single-click on the icon of your hard drive on your desktop. Once it’s selected, chose “Get Info” from the file menu.

Here’s what you should see for Windows (left) and Mac (right):

These information windows tell you how big your drive is, how much information you have used and how much you have left. If you’re like most writers, your drive is mostly unused. So if you were worried that your drive was too full, you can stop worrying. You may have a large number of documents on your computer, but text doesn’t take up very much space. Imagine everything you will ever write. For a prolific writer, that’s a lot of paper. But storing that on an 80 GB hard drive is like storing the paper inside a ocean-going shipping container.

For both Mac and Windows, in order for your computer to work efficiently, you want to keep at least 10% of your hard drive unused space. On the Mac shown above, the HD size is 74.5 GB, so the “Available” number should never fall below 7.5 GB.

What’s On Your Hard Drive?
In addition to the documents you’ve created, your computer has two other broad categories of files — Operating System (OS) files and Application files. OS files give your computer its basic capabilities like printing and reading hard drives. Application files give your computer the ability to do help you do particular things — e.g. Microsoft Word lets you create all kinds of documents, Adobe PhotoShop lets you edit photographs and Microsoft Excel lets you create spreadsheets.

Note: In general, you never want to delete or change either OS or application files directly unless you’re an advanced user. You should use utilities (applications that perform maintenance functions) like Install and Uninstall to do this for you and even then, only when you’re sure that you understand what’s happening.

All computers use the metaphor of files and folders (which are also referred to as directories). Your hard drive contains many files and folders. In both Windows XP and Mac OS X, there are two places on your hard drive where you will store all of the documents you create — your desktop and your Documents folder (My Documents in Windows). And although it may not look like it, your desktop is actually a folder on your hard drive as well. The desktop folder is a special folder that displays its contents on the area of your screen that you see when no other windows are open.

Just for comparison, in the Garden of Eden, all the trees were useable except one. In your computer garden, there are two trees you can use and you should probably leave the rest alone. In the G of E, once you got booted out — you were out. Game over. Thankfully, for your computer garden, if you mess the place up, you might also get booted out, but you can usually hire someone to clean it up for you and let you back in.

How to Use Your Desktop
The relationship between your computer desktop and your Documents folder parallels their physical world counterparts. The Documents folder is like your file cabinets and bookshelves — it’s your main, long-term storage space. There are well developed rules for how to organize filing cabinets and aesthetic rules for how to organize bookshelves. Your physical desktop is your personal workspace. In general, it’s for shorter term storage than your filing cabinets. It’s mainly for the stuff that you’re currently working on. Just as in the physical world, only you can decide how to best organize your desktop — it’s whatever works best for you. There are 3 main strategies that I notice people use:

A) No Clutter — the desktop has either nothing on it or only has your most commonly used shortcuts. All documents are stored where they belong.

B) Temporary Storage — the desktop is a “To Be Filed” space — a place to hold relatively unimportant folders and files and things you’ve downloaded until you delete them or put them away where they belong. Most of it will eventually be deleted.

C) My Current Working Set — the desktop holds all the documents and folders you’re currently working on. After you’re finished working on them, they eventually get filed where they belong. A tip for those who use this strategy: make a folder called “To Be Filed” on your desktop.

You might find that the strategy you use in the physical world is different than the one you find most useful on your computer. Strangely, a lot of people who are messy in the real world are neat on their computers and vice versa. If you’re a computer neatnik, you’ll probably use A. I use B and Sheila uses C. Regardless of which strategy you choose, evaluate it once in a while to see if it’s still working well for you. Fix it if it isn’t.

Just as in the physical world, you will need to reorganize your desktop more often than your Documents folder. Perhaps you’ll find that when it’s time to clean your physical desktop, it’s also time to clean up your computer desktop. For me, a good time to clean my desktop is when I’m doing mid-range and long-range planning activities. Every couple of weeks, I do my mid-range planning. I look over the files and folders on my desktop at this time because they might remind me of a project I haven’t completed or something else I need to put on my to-do list. I’ll throw away the stuff I know I don’t want anymore, but it’s not a rigorous scrubbing. If you use Strategy C, I especially think you should check in with your desktop and straighten it up frequently.

When doing long-range planning, which for me is maybe twice a year, I take a close look at every item on my desktop and decide: keep, file or delete. But again, how and when you do your desktop maintenance is all up to you. On the other hand, if your desktop fills up completely or has so many items that you can’t find things, your system has broken, so fix it. Maybe just the quick fix of using your “To Be Filed” folder is enough. If you decide to use a “To Be Filed” folder, though, you must empty it out and file everything all away every 6 months or you will forget what the most of that stuff is and what it was connected to.

Note: There are many ways to create a folder, but if you’re new at this, when you’re in the place where you want to create a new folder, go to the File menu and choose “New Folder”. Then give that folder the name you want it to have.

The (My) Documents Folder
Your Documents folder needs to be much more organized than your desktop. The goal of this organization should be to minimize or eliminate the ambiguity of where something should be stored.

You already know some of the principles of organizing your Documents folder because some of the same rules that you learned in school about how to organize an outline apply to organizing your Documents folder. For example, items at the same level of an outline are usually peers — all items of the same type. If one item in your outline is a reason for building the new highway, then all the other items at that level should be other reasons for building the new highway.

At the top level of your Documents folder, the organizing principle is Category of Purpose — what is the purpose for the folders and files that will be stored inside? If you are attending or teaching school, for example, make one of the folders at this top level “School Documents”. On Windows, you may want to follow their example and call it “My School Documents”. You might also, have at this level, “My Work Documents”, “My Financial Documents”, “My Personal Writing”, “My Commercial Writing”, “My Home & Garden Related Documents”, “My Family Documents”, “My Business Documents” — whatever make sense for the purposes of the documents you are storing.

The top level is the most important level of organization; it’s critical get it right. There should be no ambiguity between the purpose categories you choose at this level. If you use the categories listed above, it should be very clear in your mind where personal writing about your family should go. For me, it would belong in “Personal Writing” and not in “My Family Documents”. You might make a different choice, but it should be clear to you what your choice is. Similarly, it needs to be clear that your school documents will go in “My School Documents” and your children’s school documents will go in “My Family Documents”.

Just like an outline, the idea is to organize everything from the most general categories to the most specific — you should not make folders called “Billy’s 3rd Grade Teacher Evaluations” or “2006 IRS Deduction Worksheets” or “Poems About My Dad” at this top level. Instead, “Billy’s 3rd Grade Teacher Evaluations” might be inside a folder called “Billy’s School Documents” inside the top level “Family Documents” folder.

Inside each of your top level folders, make folders for sub-categories of purpose. Inside your “Financial Documents” folder, you might have “Budget Documents”, “Portfolio Statements”, “Tax Documents”. When I buy things online, for example, I either save or make a PDF of the receipt page and store it in a folder called “eReceipts” inside my “Financial” folder. Inside your “Commercial Writing” folder, you might create a folder called “Clients”, where you make a folder with the name of each of your clients.

The Limits of Organization
Here’s another place where your knowledge of outlining comes in handy — your teachers told you that you shouldn’t create an outline level if there’s only one or two items. Similarly, if you’ve only got 2 clients, you don’t need a “Clients” folder; just make a folder for “Smith” and one for “Jones”. Then, inside the client folders, make sub-folders according to individual projects and/or deliverables.

On the other hand, if you’ve got 100 clients, you need to find a way to group them into smaller batches. One hundred folder is way too many items to be contained in a single folder. Try to keep the number of folders at any level under 25, and use 50 as your absolute maximum. For your clients, you could group them into “Clients A-D”, “Clients E-J”, etc. or any system that makes sense to you. Again, whatever the system, the goal is “no ambiguity”.

One way to keep the number of items down is to make a folder called “Clients – Inactive”. Notice that I named it this way instead of “Inactive Clients” so it would alphabetize together with the other clients’ folders. If you completed a project for UC Santa Barbara nine months ago and you aren’t trying to foster any more business with them or they with you, slide the “UC Santa Barbara” folder into “Clients – Inactive”. If things change, you can always move it back into the active clients. Making an “old” or “inactive” folder can make sense at every level except the top level. Do not create an “Old Financial Documents” folder at the top level, create it inside the “Financial Documents” folder instead.

Just like you shouldn’t create more than 25 folders inside a single level, there’s a limit on how many levels deep your system should go and it’s about the same depth as an outline: five levels should be all you’d ever need and there’s no reason to go deeper than eight. The “25” comes from the fact that for most people, 25 folders is near the limit of how many folders their screen can display at a time and, not coincidentally, it’s right at the human limit of how many things we can scan easily without losing our place visually. The numbers concerning folder depth come for the limitations we have in conceptualizing things into chains of connections. If you push beyond these limits, the ambiguity factor in storing the documents is going to increase and your ability to find your documents easily will decrease.

In summary, think of your Documents folder like a file room where you have lots of filing cabinets. A top level folder is like an individual file cabinet in that room. The second level folder is like is like a drawer in that file cabinet. The third level is like a hanging folder in that drawer. The fourth level is for the manila folders inside the hanging folders. Inside the manila folders is the fifth level.

Some Fine Points

Special Document Types
For some document types, you have to figure out whether it’s better to store them all together or alongside other documents in your organizational structure. From example, if you store digital photos on your computer, you could store all your pictures together in “My Pictures” and make sub-folders under there according to the date or location where you took the picture. You could also follow your existing structure and store family pictures inside the “Family Documents” in a folder under “Family Pictures”. For most people, storing all photographs together is the right way to go because where do you file the picture of your daughter playing with the church softball team, which you took the same day as the picture of your best friends at the ice cream parlor after the game? Do those two pictures go into different folders? Of course they don’t.

Except for photos that you might take or use for your work, the best solution will probably be to store all of your recreational photos inside the “My Pictures” folder at the top level and make your categories of pictures under that level. For photos that you took or are using for your work, you’ll probably want to file them according the client or project that they are for.

When You’re Not Sure Where to Store It
What if you can’t figure out where to file something? Unlike in an outline, the answer is to store it at the lowest level that makes unambiguous sense and keep it there until a new category emerges. It’s OK to keep documents inside folders, even the top folder until it becomes apparent that a category should be made. Keep in mind that your documents count against the maximum number of items in a folder, however (25 optimal, 50 max).

For example, about a year ago, I just started writing down some of the half-baked ideas that spin around inside my head. I don’t do much purely creative writing, so I don’t have a “Personal Writing” folder. These individual files sat inside My Documents until I had five or six of them, at which time I created a folder called “Crackpot Notions”. This folder is still in My Documents because it doesn’t have another category that it falls under.

About File Names
Modern operating systems let you have long file and folder names. I think it’s best to make use of this ability, but only to reduce ambiguity. So I think its fine to have a document called “To Penny’s teacher about the farm field trip ” for example. I also have a habit of saving drafts of the longer documents I write, so you might find a “Toyota Network Recommendations Doc – first draft” along with the similar document titles ending in v1, v2, v3 all the way up to” Toyota Network Recommendations Doc – Final”.

Archiving
With what I do for a living, I end up with lots of data. It’s all stored by customer and project, but after some time has passed, I don’t need to have this data on my hard drive anymore. Because the files are huge and numerous, I actually need to get them off my hard drive, but I still want them available — I don’t really know why, but I do. So, I periodically make a “Customer Archive” on a CD or DVD, depending on how much data it is. I make two copies, verify that I can read them both, then store the discs in a special protective jacket inside a special CD file drawer. Then I delete the files off the hard drive with a huge knot in my stomach.

Archiving is different than backing up. You back up your active information in case something goes wrong; you archive your inactive information and make a permanent record of it just in case some day, some one might want to look at it again.

Keeping Everything
I have access to pretty much everything I’ve written or done in the last 15 years either on my hard drive or in an archive. A big reason for this is that “computers” is what I do. Another is that sometimes a job that I did six years ago might become source material for an article. Having this much information, I depend on a completely unambiguous organizational system to find any of the 27,000 documents under My Documents that take up 7 GB of space on my hard drive.

Even if you only create four documents a week on different subjects for different purposes for five years, that’s 1,000 documents, which is far more than you can keep track of mentally without good organization. Follow the rules I’ve laid out here and you’ll be able to find any one of them easily and quickly.