How to Organize Important Documents on a Computer

Organizing computer files can be a daunting task, and with more stuff like pictures, movies, songs, books and even work files being stored in soft format. It is very important to de-clutter the PC, like it is to de-clutter your desk. To begin with, you need to at least organize all the important documents into folders.

Which documents are important?

Firstly, having soft copies of all your certificates and degrees help a lot when you have to send something through email. It is a one-time effort and can save a lot of duplicate effort if exhaustively done once and for all. So just get all the important certificates and degrees out of your closet and sit down to scan them all. Nowadays, even the phone camera can scan very good images, so use that if you don’t have a scanner at home.

The other documents are all the things that are unique in nature. There might be some childhood photographs for which we never had any soft copies. It would be a good idea to scan them too before they get damaged. Of course, you also need to save and backup all the pictures from your digital camera regularly.

Steps to Organize Important Documents

I use a very simple folder structure which I find easy to use. Let’s say the outermost folder is called ‘Docs’, so I create folders for each of the family members. Say we have Mark and Mary in the family, so we’ll have two folders, “Docs/Mark” and “Docs/Mary”. If there are many family members, I suggest using numbers to sort in the order that makes it easy for your use. Example may be “Docs/01 Mark” & “Docs/02 Mary”. This trick works very well as you can name and sort things based on their importance. I recommend using this trick again and again for organizing stuff. It saves a lot of time while searching for the important stuff. An alphabetical sort is not necessarily the best sorting for all purposes and using numbers give us control of sorting. If you want to use DOS for accessing, you might want to consider using “01_” instead of “01 “.

Now inside each family member’s folder, there would be multiple folders like “01_Work”, “02_Academic”, “03_IDs”, “04_Certificates”, “05_Investments”, “06_Tax”, and “07_UnSorted”. This sample list covers most of the things we have important documents for. I normally don’t include all the utility bills in this folder. I have a separate folder structure for utility bills which I arrange year-wise, as that might be shared among family members. The documents structure is for individual’s important documents.

How to Organize Photos and Videos?

The best way that I have found so far is to organize them by year and then by event. There aren't so many events that happen in one year. Maybe we have pictures for 25 events, which still won’t be too much. We might have a folder for a place we visited that year. This may span over months. Organizing it by year at the top level is also very important as it provides completeness. Once, the year is complete you know when you have organized all the photos for that year, and then you just need to incrementally take care of the photos clicked during the new year. The videos could be either given their own folder if there aren't too many of them, else they can be clubbed with the photos folders to give them proper context.

Back Up all the Important Documents

The above structure that we create needs to be saved and updated locally on the machine. However, I strongly recommend you backing up these regularly. You can either buy an external hard disk and make a backup every month, or you can use some of the free cloud based services that are available like DropBox, SugarSync, Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive or any other services that are secure and serve the purpose.