Practices for organizing your digital life Fresno 2018

What are your needs for organizing your digital life?

Files are spread out and need to be centralized Organizing company drobox How do I determine what I need and how do I get rid of the emails and files I don’t need, and how do I identify what I can keep. Making videos and other projects. When do I save onto a cloud and how do I make sure I can keep files where I can find them when I need them.

Practices for places to start organizing digital life

• One big problem I see is people are cluttered,

How to declutter? One question is what is the purpose of uploading the file onto my computer?

• • the flies may be time sensitive, easy access

Make sure that everything is processed. It is not about where it lands first it is about where it ends up. Do you or your company have a centralized filing system?

• Another way to declutter. If you have not moved the file into its correct location then do you really need it? – you can retrieve any info so it not necessary to keep everything, it is possible to get things back from where it came
• Change the way you view files there are easy ways to a view your files. It is not necessary to clutter your desktop. if files are managed in the files manager of the computer (Files explorer Microsoft, Finder iOS)
• Weekly reviews of your emails and files. Don’t be afraid of deleting file if they are not being moved or used and are more then two weeks old. Programs like Hazel can organize your files for you and you can set your own rules so it is organizing automatedly.
• Invest 5-10 minutes a day to organize

Doing this will make it easier to find what you need and make you familiar with your files.

• Rename your files to make them easier to find

If your files names are irrelevant or hard to find rename them. So that you can recognize what it is when you see it. You can use the titles to search in finder or files manager to make it easier

• Who is your files manager? – Is there a shared file structure? If you share files in drobox or other online file sharing site there must be only one person to have control and accountability for organizing and finding files. This person should control the structure.
• Be Intentional- you must slow down and be intentional with the way you share data and how you store it.
• Does it need to be in my Email inbox? Look through your email and declutter all the unused files. If a email is important then save it onto your computer or a file so it is easy to find in the future.
• Unsubscribe- “Updated our privacy policy” look for this, this means there may be some unwanted subscriptions you didn’t now about. You can filter emails from email received from “non-humans”
• The job is never done- you need to keep at it, you can never truly fail or succeed in organizing your life because it is a continuous process and it requires up keep.
• Gmail – in setting you can configure inbox. this decides where email go. You can redirect email into a specified inbox. Purge your unread emails. In Gmail type “is:unread” into search bar at the top and you can see all unread email.
• Don’t do notifications- Make sure that you have times that you have set aside to check emails, if a notification comes in you may see it and forget, setting a time s makes sure you check at the same time every day then you can make sure it doesn’t clutter.
• Can you do it in under 2 minutes? If it is possible to get a reply done in les then 2 minutes, then do it. If it takes longer then make a to do list.
• Do not allow list serves inundate – It is important to keep up with organization, but do not let it stress you. You don’t have to view everything, choose what you want to see and be sure to do it often so you don’t fall behind. You can also use rss feeds to use a different medium so that the list serves do not take space in your email.
• Do you need to be notified? Notifications are not necessary. With less notifications you will have less distractions and be able to focus better.