finally get my computer organized

Just finish that crappy Start Menu-Stuff and I’m done. Yeehaa!

Here are some tricks for organizing the computer that will make your life much easier.

Documents you create yourself, like letters, budget spreadsheets, etc., belong in your documents folder. On MS-Windows, this folder is called your “My Documents” folder. On the Macintosh it is called simply “Documents”.

Create a directory off your C: drive (on those old DOS and Windows computers) or your home directory (on Linux, Mac OS/X, Unix, etc.) – called “downloads”. Set your Firefox or whatever web browser you use to save files it downloads into that directory by default. If you have or you will get a lot of files from one corporation or institution, create a directory inside your “downloads” directory with that organization’s name. Move your files from it into there instead.

Instead of putting your favorite bookmarks, over and over into each new browser on each new computer you get, try using this web site instead – http://del.icio.us/ It lets you save bookmarks. Not only do you get to save the name of the page and its URL – it lets you save keyword(s) for it too. You can find pages by keyword faster than by the name or the URL, trust me.

If you use Firefox as your web browser, you can organize your bookmarks into folders easily; just look in the “Bookmarks” menu for the “Manage Bookmarks…” command. It is pretty self-explanatory.

If you are lucky enough to have a Macintosh and it is running the latest version of Mac OS X (version 10.4 or later) then in addition to this stuff, you can set up “Smart Folders”.

These special smart folders will keep track of all of the files on your Macintosh’s hard disk that match their criteria. For instance, you can have a folder for all files in your downloads directory that are less than a week old. You could have a folder for all music files.

Microsoft Windows does not have this capability. If you use it, sorry.

Apple’s iTunes runs on both the Macintosh computer and computers running Microsoft’s Windows 2000 or Windows XP. In iTunes they have “Smart Playlists” which are very similar to the Macintosh’s “Smart Folder”.

You can organize your music into smart playlists. That way, the folder will always have the songs you intend for it to have in it, without having to bother to put them into it yourself.

Here are some of my Smart Playlists in iTunes on my Macintosh:

• 90’s Music
• 1980s
• 1990s
• 2001
• 2002
• 2003
• 2004
• 2005
• Avril Lavigne
• Beatles
• Beatles and members
• Bif Naked
• Bree Sharp
• Country
• Folk
• Jazz
• Joan Jett
• Mary Prankster
• My Top Rated
• Podcasts Added Today
• Purchased This Week
• Recently Played
• Top 25 Most Played

As you can see, iTunes lets you organize your music collection very naturally. You just have to make up the category by selecting the “New Smart Playlist” command, then spelling out the criteria to use, and giving it a meaningful name – like the ones seen above. Try it. Once you start you won’t be able to stop for a half hour!

If you have an iPod, these Smart Playlists will show up in it along with the regular manual playlists. Personally, I have a lot of smart playlists now and I hardly bother with the regular ones!

If you have a lot of weblogs you are working with, you might want to consider having one site you can see your latest blog postings for each summarized. A site capable of this does exist. Go to http://360.yahoo.com/ and list your blogs in your profile in there. You can set who gets to see what according to what group of friends or contacts they are in. Just read the site when you are setting it up.

Email needs to get organized. It is probably the most plentiful kind of item on your computer. Thanks to spam, mailing lists, chatty friends, and so forth – it piles up quickly.

There are two tools for organizing email that are available to both Macintosh and MS-Windows users: folders and rules.

Create folders with each of the following names, if they are relevant to you:

• Friends
• Relatives
• School
• Support
• Work

Next you can set up a rule that moves incoming email into the appropriate folder based on the sender’s email address (or the domain name part of it, such as @mit.edu).

Almost this same trick applies to Gmail. Except with Gmail web mail accounts you use labels instead of folders, and you can apply more than one label to each email message. Labels are basically keywords. So the same names you see in my previous list to use for folder names in an email program on your computer, you could use as label names in Gmail.

Organizing your files and other items can easily be mostly automated. The means to do this on different computers and in different kinds of programs is rapidly becoming very similar.

The same criteria that you once used to manually searech for a particular item in your email or a particular file on your hard drive – can now be used to keep track of every item that fits in the same category as it does. All the time. Automatically.

When you use these tricks, next time you are looking for something, it will not take that long to find it. And that is what organization is all about!