See also "Tips" and "Efficiency".
This is all about your own attention span, attention focus, concentration, your own memory, being efficient and being friendly to whoever may need to use your work or need to replace you.
You memory is not infinite and not infallible and not accurate. Your attention span is not infinite, your concentration is limited, your attention focus is not infinitely wide. You will just not remember what you did six months ago on your computer, but you still have to find that document you filed away then.
- Spend a lot of time choosing good names for files and folders. Spend time ordering your files and folders in a structure that you can remember easily. Do not hesitate to nest folders within folders quite deeply: it is easier to find your way in a structure with 5 or 6 levels than in one large mess on the desktop. Use the alphabet: if you have a large number of different subject categories, create a folder for each letter of the alphabet and use a classification similar to that of an encyclopaedia.
- Keep related files in the same structure. Do not use a folder for text documents, another for drawings, a third for spreadsheets. Rather use a folder for a project so that you can find all the documents of one project (attention focus) in one place.
- Use meaningful and long names for documents. The time invested is recovered a hundredfold later when you are looking for a document you made several months earlier. Call a document "DifferentialWithWires.html" rather than "DwWires.html" or "DWnew.html". In general, do not use "new", "latest", "old" in document names. If the time is important, use the full date, e.g. "NewsPhoto-2004-02-13.jpeg"
- Do not repeat folder names in document names. If you have a folder "Announcements" with in it folders for each year's announcements, then do not call those folders "Announcements2002", "Announcements2003", "Announcements2004" etc. Just call them "2002", "2003", "2004". This will be much less cluttered in all views of the Announcements folder. In addition, if you are looking for something that happened in 2002, but you don't remember its name nor whether it was an announcement or an annual report, it will be easier to search for "2002".
- Learn the use of the special keys on the keyboard: command, option, control, shift, enter, return.
