Back to School: Organize Your Files and Folders

The summer is over, which means that thousands of people will go back to school. No matter whether you’re still in high school or are a PhD student, you can make your life easier by organizing your schoolwork. Having your work organized properly will help you become more efficient, study better and save time. Here are some tips that will help you organize your files and folders.

1. Create an efficient folder structure

Organizing your schoolwork is easy, but you need to start from the very beginning. That is, create a folder structure for your work. I know it sounds boring and even time-consuming, but you will thank yourself later on in the year. Because if you are planning to dump all your stuff on your desktop or stuff it into the Documents folder, your computer will become a real mess in less than two months. So don’t be lazy and invest some of your time into creating different folders and subfolders for your school work. Create a separate folder for each subject and subfolders for different tasks like essays, projects, and so on.

2. Sync your files across different devices

Nothing is more frustrating than having to start your work afresh because you can’t access your home or school computer. That’s why you should make sure all your school-related files and folders are synced across different devices, so that you can access the stuff you are working on from anywhere. There are a lot of free services that allow you to do just that, plus they act as a Cloud backup service. Dropbox, Google Drive, Gigasize, DropSend – they all can help you. Simply choose the one that you like best.

3. Delete duplicate files

No matter how hard you try to be organized, you are bound to create some duplicate files. Sometimes you save two different versions of an essay and forget to delete one of them when you no longer need it, sometimes you work on different versions of the same project, and sometimes you simply save the same files twice, so that they end up in different folders. Duplicate files can be really annoying because they can confuse you. Imagine working on a document only to find out that you were editing the wrong version. In addition to that, duplicate files waste disk space and make tasks like backup and syncing take longer. There are a lot of programs that can help you delete duplicate files automatically, such as Easy Duplicate Finder and Duplicate Finder.

4. Make your computer run faster

If your computer is running slow, then you can forget efficient college work. If files take ages to open, your PC is full of errors and Web pages take a long time to load, you can’t study well. That’s why it’s really important to keep your computer well maintained and running fast. To have your PC function properly, you need to make sure it’s free of junk files, has no registry errors and your hard drive is defragmented. Windows built-in Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter utilities can help you deal with junk files and disk fragmentation, but they can’t fix registry errors. That’s why you’d be better off using a tool like RegAce that can do it all for you.

Now you know how to organize your PC for efficient school work. Stick to this advice and have a great academic year!