Geek to Live: Organizing "My Documents"

by Gina Trapani

Last week we discussed how to organize your paperwork with a filing cabinet, some manila folders and a label maker. Today we're going to tackle that virtual yellow folder on your computer called "My Documents."

If your current file organization system works for you, congratulations. But if you frequently find yourself letting files clutter your computer's desktop, or if you spend time arranging files in a deep, complicated hierarchy of fine-grained folders, it's time for a revamp. Remember, with simplicity comes effortlessness. A few simple but flexible buckets can get your bits and bytes under control so you can spend less time moving files around and more time getting work done.

There are a million and one ways to arrange files and folders on disk. Some might argue that spending a moment even thinking about it in the age of desktop search is unnecessary. That may be true, but some semblance of order will clear your desktop and your mind and make you "ready for anything." Over the years I've come up with a six folder structure for "My Documents" which I create on every computer I use without fail. This scheme accommodates every file I might come across, keeps my desktop clear, smoothly fits in with an automated backup system and also makes command line file wrangling a breeze.

This is just one way that won't work for everyone, but there may be something here to help you get your digital documents under control. In alphabetical order, my six main folders are called: bak, docs, docs-archive, junkdrawer, multimedia and scripts. Here's a quick rundown of what each does and what it might contain.

1. bak

2. I spend a lot of time at the command line, so I always opt for shortened file names. In this case, bak is short for backup - but it isn't what you think. Your data backups will reside on external disks, but the bak folder holds application-specific exported backup data. For instance, your bak folder might contain your Firefox and Thunderbird MozBackup files (you backup before you install new extensions, right?), your Quicken file backup, your Address Book exported CSV, or a dump of your weblog's database.

3. docs

4. Docs is the big kahuna of all the six folders. It's the place where all the working files for your currently in-progress tasks, projects and clients go. Docs changes often and frequently, and should be purged often. I have many sub folders in docs, like "finance," "clients," and "creative-writing." The "clients" folder has sub folders too, like "lifehacker" and "kinja." That gets us 3 sub folders in, and that's usually as deep as I'm willing to go.

5. docs-archive

6. Your docs file should be purged of no longer "working" files frequently. "Closed" files - on a completed project, for a former employer, for past tax years - should go into your docs-archive. This archive exists just for reference and search, but the separate folder keeps all that extra stuff from cluttering up docs, which is basically your working task dashboard. The files in docs-archive don't change much if ever, and so you can back them up on a different (less frequent) schedule as a result.

7. junkdrawer

8. The junkdrawer (or temp, or tmp) is a temporary holding pen for files you're messing around with but don't need to save long-term. Firefox and Thunderbird should both save to junkdrawer by default for downloads and mail attachments. When I'm cropping and sharpening photos to upload, checking out a video or just testing out a script or program, into junkdrawer the files go. Files I decide I want to keep graduate from junkdrawer into docs; otherwise, the automated hard drive janitor I wrote about awhile back comes sweeping through and deletes anything older than 2 weeks from junkdrawer while I sleep.

9. multimedia

10. Here's where your music, video and photos folders go. In terms of managing your media within this folder, I'm generally content to let iTunes and Picasa take care of things. Of course your preference may vary, but the benefit of having all those space-hogging sound, video and image files under one multimedia umbrella parent folder is backup. Chances are your multimedia backup scheme will be different than your documents backup because of the lesser change frequency and the gigabytage required. Drop 'em all here in the multimedia folder and you're good to go. Keep in mind that sharing your media with a home web server works nicely with an overarching multimedia folder, too.

11. scripts

12. The scripts folder is where any executable script or shortcut lives. Here I keep my previously-mentioned weight logger and janitor scripts, any batch scripts and Windows shortcuts for quick launching programs.

A word about Windows' default home directory

As I said, I'm a big fan of short and to the point file paths. Windows' default user documents directory is something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\Gina\My Documents\

To which I say, "For the love of all that is good and holy, why, Microsoft, why?"

I can appreciate human-readable folder names, but I do lots of command line work and scripting, and I don't ever want to have to remember to enclose my home directory path in quotes or remember the slashes to escape spaces. So to make things easier, I always change the home "My Documents" directory to c:\home\gina\. This consistently lowercase path sans spaces is much easier to type, remember and much more scriptable.

To change your documents directory in Windows, right-click on the "My Documents" icon. Under Properties, hit the Move button.

Choose the new location. Windows will politely ask if you'd like to move all your documents from the old location to the new one. Go ahead and do that if you need to.

Note about changing your home directory your documents directory: If you change your "My Documents" path, some dumb Windows applications will STILL think that the C:\Documents and Settings\blah... path is your home directory, so sometimes application data will get saved there. I figure this info can't be too important if the app couldn't figure out where the new home directory is, but it This is something worth keeping in mind.
Update: Reader Helena points out that there is a difference between the home directory and the "My Documents" folder, which would explain why Windows apps would still save files to the original home directory. Looks like I'm the dumb one! Thanks, Helena!

Beyond the big 6

If you've read this far, then I'm going to let you in on a little secret: these aren't the only folders that live in my home directory. Being a programmer and web developer, if the workstation I'm on is a development machine, I also frequently work within a "code" folder and a "webserver" folder (the root of my Apache installation.) Also, many Windows applications take it upon themselves to create folders in "My Documents." Sometimes I leave 'em, other times I'll explicitly set where stuff gets saved - like my Trillian IM logs or Thunderbird mail archives location (docs and docs-archive, respectively.)

But enough about me. There must be strong feelings out there about filing versus piling and what the best folder structure is. So, lifehackers, show us your filing mojo. What does your "My Documents" look like? Why does it (or doesn't it) work for you? Let us know in the comments or at tips at lifehacker.com.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, enjoys a well-organized folder more than she should admit. Her semi-weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.