My Documents Folders

 

On this page you can download a simple batch file that's easy to edit in order to make any sort of directory structure you think you might like. 

But first let's talk a little about the philosophy of folder organization.

 

Don’t use folders to store files according to the application that made them (PowerPoint’s, Excel, etc.), or by their generic type such as letters, drawings, receipts, etc. Instead, store them by topic or project. Storing by app or type is okay - until you have lots of stuff; then it gets hard to remember: was so-and-so a PP or a PDF?

 

Spend some time looking at your documents and deciding what major topics they fall into. There should be a folder in My Documents for every important topic (Home, Vehicles, Hobbies, Business, Shopping, Projects…) you deal with.  Whenever you start a new project, create an appropriately named folder for it, and put it in an appropriate topic folder, and put a shortcut to it in the main Projects folder as well; that way you'll be able to get to it two ways.

 

Music, movies, and photographs are probably exceptions as they are not so topic oriented.  Folders like My Music, My Movies (Videos), and My Pictures can go at the top level or in a folder named \Entertainment or the like.   If you want to put pictures in a particular project folder, and still want them to appear in My Pictures as well, put a shortcut (or better yet an alias – click here see what they are) to the project folder into My Pictures.

 

Whenever any folder accumulates lots of documents, start putting files in sub-folders in order to keep the number of items at every level down to less than a page long in Explorer, so you can scan and understand the list quickly. Don't worry that deeply nested folders seem like they'd be tedious to get at - shortcuts can get you there with one click.

 

 

Here are three sample My Documents folder structures.  Each paragraph describes the folder immediately below it.

 

I've been using this folder structure for 15 years.  It contains over 100,000 items yet the top level still fits on one page.  There are far too many nested folders to expand it here.

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You can create any folder structure you want -similar to this one or not - by clicking here to download the batch file folders.bat.  Now, create a new folder called MyDocsNew, for example.  Move folders.bat there, and open it in your editor.  Read the instructions and edit it in order to construct whatever folder structure you want. 

 

This folder structure is very terse, yet it works well for many people.  In a way, it's very action oriented, and stimulates you to get things out of the Inbox quickly, and to deal with things in Actions without procrastinating.  It came from this website, in case you want to read how its author uses it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Move Stuff to New My Documents

 

There's no real easy way to move everything from your old to your new MD.  That's the job of specialized software that I'll develop if feedback from this website is encouraging.  In the meantime, here's a reasonable way to do it.  The basic idea is to get the old MD stuff onscreen in one window and the new MD Folder structure on view in several more windows, so that you can drag and drop efficiently.  What we want is this:

 

Figure 1.

 

We have the disorganized parts of the old MD in the left pane and as much of the Folder structure as possible in the other two panes.  You can open even more panes to see more of the Folder structure if you need to.  Now you can drag-and drop from the left pane to the folders in the right panes in order to move documents to appropriate folders in the new MD structure. 

 

If you haven't a clue how to setup the above screen, read the paragraph below.

 

Click on , then right-click on My Documents, then click on Explore in the pop-up menu (see the picture at left).  This will open one explorer window on MD.  Do it again to open a second window, and again to open a third.  You should have three windows open onto MD on your screen.  Right-click on the empty part of your toolbar (lower-right of screen) and select Tile Windows Vertically (see little picture below).

The three MD windows should now share the screen, one-third to each.  You'll have to adjust a little to get the left and right panes right in each window.  You can slide the border between the two panes by hovering the cursor over the border until a little double arrow appears and then dragging left or right (see picture).  One more detail: you click on the icons in the Folder views to expand the folders. 

 

Figure 2.