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June 18, 2025

A semi-organized digital life

drawing - girl at home office with cold tea
I am, more or less, digital with my artworks and writings and my blog and previous blogs and various other things so I have thousands of digital files. They accumulate even when I try to delete and sort them. You might think if you can see everything at once, files on your screen and not physical boxes surrounding you, it would be easy to organize them but nope. But at least I'm semi-organized.
    I usually make folders and name them with numbers at the beginning in order of importance and sometimes if I want a folder at the top I use zeros so my folders look like this:
Example A

    I sort them by name so the numbered folders are in the order I want. And then there are sub folders within these folders so I have folders like these:

Example B
Example C
For my artwork, I organize them by years (see example B) so that's pretty simple. For my blogs, I also organized by years and then by months (see example C). For my writing, I mostly end up with folders such as finished, in progress or maybe finished. And for other things, it's whatever I thought makes most sense.
    I have two main folders - one for archived files (files I'm done with) and one for recent files (things I'm still working on) so I know where to put files. Having two main folders helps to keep clutter down although I'm more organized with my finished files than my recent files. It's gotten easier to find the files I want ever since I got organized with my files.
    Of course there is no single, perfect solution to organizing files because files (and folders) get changed, renamed or even sometimes corrupted but mostly I get messy and end up with loose files (sometimes with temporary names) not in folders. So I'll keep re-re-re-organizing my files until, well, who knows when. (Note: I use Macs only but I imagine you can organize files pretty much the same on any type of computer systems.)

How do you organize your digital files?

2 comments:

  1. My photographs are ordered by subject and date.
    My writing (such as it is) isn't ordered. Words for Wednesday for example gets deleted as soon as I have the next week's words.

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  2. Unfortunately, because I work a lot at school, I also help my in-laws, my husband has a health issue, and we often go to the hospital, I have very little time left. I have many hard drives full of photos I took from the past, as well as many with texts and material from my master's program. They are still organized according to the date they were taken or written. Some weekends, I try to organize them by topic, but I still have a lot of work to do and a chaos to deal with.

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