Re-discovering Lost Treasures...

Before, doing serious Internet Marketing:
Do You (Need To) Take Time To Get Organized?
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Re-discovering Lost Treasures:

Do you always work in a way which leaves things easy to find anytime, or are you often going back later to try to find files, notes, programs, modifications, PFD’s, plugins, graphics, Zip files, etc?

1) Either you are habitually organized, or not.

2) If ‘Yes’, I’m envious of you. Many files could belong in more than one category.

3) If you put them in ‘both places’, then ‘later revision updating’ is a hassle.

4) You store them in just one folder, then the same file can be hard to find later; “What was the filename??”

• How do you keep personal and business files organized?
• You are able to do this ‘real-time’, by habit, or do you go back weeks (even months) later and re-discover lost treasure?

Any wisdom you can share would be nice.
Thanks

 

The only way to keep organised is to devote time to organisation regularly. Whether that's the last working hour of the week, or the first on monday doesn't matter. What does matter is that when stuff gets too cluttered: act on that fast and do something about it.
Also: do save files by subject, and year.
I have folders 'work', 'website', 'study', 'family' etc.
Subfolders are often by subject as well 'client A', client B (etc) or by year. And those can be split up when it gets too cluttered as well. Things like:
business/clientA/website
business/clienA/contracts
Good luck. You can't get organised by only having a clean up once a year. Still, having a clean up by filing everything you have right now onto a cd-rom and start over may help: as long as you do start creating meaningful directories for stuff you often have files for.

 

Your advice is sound.
I've recently discovered this 'wisdom' and have a lot of work to do.

Possible Keys to recovery:

1. Don't make it any worse
2. All new ideas and projects get organized from the start
3. Older projects (dropped for any reason) all get 'found', re-filed and evaluated ASAP.

There are still issues with many files possibly belonging in more than one category.

• Everybody needs to tackle the 'uncertain areas' their own way
• The #1 key to 'recovery' is getting the habit of doing organization at least once a week.

Thanks, for good advice.

 

Gotta keep organized!

I keep a running tally of "to do's" for my various websites so that I can refer back to them and make sure that I'm taking care of them.

Maybe it's just me, but it also feels good to cross them off.

For the truly anal retentive, you can use something like BaseCamp http://basecamphq.com/ to organize yourself.

 

I'm 'too casual' and free-flowing in 50 to 101 different directions.
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Something like BaseCamp sounds good, I'm going to check now.
Thanks.

 

I agree that if you have a gazillion small chores you should be doing, making a list is great. That means you can cross off the ones you've done (good feeling) and also that you can rationally weigh which are more important. If you have too much to do, without a list it's very easy to forget about some small but very important thing that needs to be done.

These days I make my lists digitally. If you use some sort of personalised homepage, (I use protopage, but there are a lot of alternatives out there), you can create to-do lists there. If they get too big, it's back to my first advice: organize them by theme or priority (or both).

[edit]YEAH, my 2000th post here [/edit]

 

About your 'more than one category' thing - that's just part of the game. You choose one and then when you try and find the info you check both options... There is no shortcut on this, but do file even this type of info.