Today, we are talking about organizing your computer.
I realized when I approached this post that discussing the topic of organizing your computer is a very large undertaking. There are different kinds of computers, different ways people use computers, and a lot of different parts of the computer that separately need organization. I liken it to saying that we’re going to organize your paper in one week. It’s just not gonna get done.
There are three main categories of tasks that need to be organized on most people’s computers… email, photos and documents, and programs.
Organizing your computer email is now a bonus in All Access.
It includes the following topics:
- Unroll.me
- Bills in your Inbox
- Eliminating Social Media Notifications
- Adding the Gmail Send and Archive Button
- Print Out Email
- Managing Group Projects in your Email
- Deleting Emails from your Phone
- The 24 Hour Rule
- My Email Workflow
- Bloggers’ Tips
Organizing computer photos.
I have included a few weeks’ worth of photo organization posts in the 10 week computer organization series above about how to organize pictures on your computer.
And those are guest posts. Because what I do is very different… I print all of the pictures I need for the year in the summer, and then I delete the photos off of my computer. I know… crazy, right? Have you ever heard of anyone doing such a thing?
Since I make all physical photo albums for my kids and our family, I don’t really see the need to keep years of digital photographs. The only time I can think I’m going to need to have digital photographs is when I want to make a slideshow for my kids’ graduations, or when someone passes away.
Actually, Joey did need to do a school project once where he needed digital photos. However, the photos that he needed for the project were never taken digitally; they were taken with a 35mm camera. So we just looked at his scrapbook and used my smart phone to take a picture of the picture. Then, I emailed him the photo from my phone and he inserted it as a photo into a slideshow.
However, I will ask you, how much are you saving on your computer just in case? Do you really need it? While I know at some point I will need digital photographs of my children, I will not need every single photograph that I have ever taken. Once you have made your digital or physical scrapbooks, if you’re going to, couldn’t you just save your favorite 10 to 24 photos for the year for each child in a folder? Do you really need to save them all?
The same can be said for documents. When I went through all of the documents on my computer, I found documents from 2003. Some of them I did need and saved, but the majority from 2003 until 2015 were able to be deleted with ease. Don’t let your digital file system become so overburdened just because it is digital.
So your challenge here is to go through and clean up your computer. You can work on just the desktop, your photo files, document files, security or email. I spent the two weeks of our last winter break combing through each part of my computer a few hours each night while the TV was on in the background.
Leave a note in the comments section and let me know what part of your computer organization you tackled and the progress you made.
PS Organize 365 now has a photo program to help you organize your actual photos! Learn more and or join the program here!
