Focus? What With This Mess?
Aug 25th, 2008 by Kiwi Champ
Do you have a clutter problem on your digital desktop, or in your My Documents folder?
There is no way we can focus on our daily plans while looking at a mess, or even thinking about it. Problem is, when we are aware of a mess, somehow our minds seem to stray towards it whether can see it or not. We need the jumble out of the way, so we can think clearly on focus on the most important tasks of our day.
This post is longer than normal, so I am including a “clickable” summary of the things I did to help organize the information on my computer. Perhaps some of these things will be of benefit to you too. I hope so.
- Clearly Defined Primary Focus
- Action – set up filing system – what my desktop looks like.
- The Optimize Folder (where I keep all my computer maintence files)
- The Links Folder (This one opens on bootup and is where I keep my short-cuts. Just a faster way for me.)
- The Reference Folder (my personal encyclopedia)
- The Daily Folder (things I am reading or studying presently)
- Freeware Software I use that makes digital life a little easier.
- The Dreaded Inbox – keep it clean. (Recommended reading)
- Desk clear, now plan and do.
- Before you start out, make sure you have the primary focus of your business (or daily activities) clearly defined. This is important because it will affect how you organize your “stuff”.
If you don’t have a clear focus and plan for your business, then every little “shiny thing” that crosses your path will distract you and your filing system will be a mixture of business and pleasure by default.
- Now its time for some action. We need to set up a filing system that will help us organize and get this mess under full control.
Here’s what I did to clean up my desk and get organized without throwing away information I might want later.
My computer desktop has just a few icons on it.
It just has:- My Computer Icon
- Recycle Bin
- Briefcase
- Four other folders — that’s it
Now I can really see the desktop background I like so much and when I boot up the computer, I am greeted with a nice photo and an organized desktop. A great start for the day.
The Four Folders:
- First is a folder that I named Optimize Inside of this folder are the short cuts to my anti-spyware software and the anti-virus software (and best of all they were free
- Then there is another folder that I have named Links that contains shortcuts to the programs I use the most. These shortcuts are renamed so they fall into categories or groups and are easy to find.
For example I renamed the shortcut to Firefox as “web_firefox” and IE is “web_ie” .. so all the icons fall into their respective category order.
- Now for the Reference Library. The third folder I named Reference.This is the folder where all your ebooks, mp3 conferences and videos will be kept. (The ones you have decided would make a good addition to your reference library).
Dont’ keep them all. For example do you still have your textbooks from high school or primary school in your closet ? Mm, pack-rats don’t answer that one.
Now it is time for a keyword exercise. You are going to place each item in a sub-folder that has a name related to a keyword you would use when you need to refer to it. That way you can go straight to it.
Another note: many files arrive with strange names which after a day or so we just dont recognize. It is good to rename them to something that we can find.
- The fourth folder I named Daily. This folder will contain material that will relate to your primary focus which you have already defined.This folder may have subfolders and/or files that are dragged in and out of it now and again as your business needs change. But the bottom line is this folder will be your working folder, with all of the other distractions in a closed folder out of the way.
- If you need free software to help you organize your system, here are some freeware items I use and like.Keynote
1.I use this to keep reference information at hand. Things like urls of Article sites, My domains, expirary dates and passwords.I like this because it it has tabs as well as trees. You can have tabs as categories and the trees inside each tab for your details.
Evernote
This one is used for snippets of information, ideas for articles. It has tags so each to search for the desiredThis is extra handy with the web plugin (Firefox has one) which allows you to highlight and save notes as you surf the net.
The desktop version connects to the web account and there you have all your notes. Nice!
Another nice thing about Evernote is it is compatible with PC AND Mac (for all the Apple lovers), plus IPhone and Mobile Phones. They are up to date!
Thunderbird Mail
My favorite email client.Not hard on computer resources (unless you are a pack-rat with 1000s of pieces of mail stored).
Easy to run to use. Compatible with hotmail and gmail.
Firefox
Many already have this installed – if you don’t I highly recommend it for the plugins.For example, my favorite plugins apart from Evernote, are the FireFTP which is a FTP client that opens as a tab inside the browser.
Fast, and super handy.
HTML Validator .. ouch. Most sites have some warnings. At least it helps to troubleshoot when things go wrong with my website.
- Now for all those emails – the dreaded Inbox!
I use a system of folders the same as the system on my hard drive for emails that contain thinks I may want to refer to later.But for the most part – all email that has no content of the “referable kind”, then it is read it and delete it
The morning after I first published this post (this is obviously an edit), a tweet came flying over Twitter from Chris Brogan with news of his new post entitled: Inbox taming for busy people
Go over and read it! I am sure you will find it very helpful.
- Finally our daily plans and “to do” list.
Based on our primary focus, we can now plan our day our day and carry out our with less distractions and more efficiently.We now will have eveything at our finger-tips (or mouse tips) with a clean desk always.
This may take a day or two to set up, but once it is complete I am sure you will find you get more done with your new organized digital environment.
Plus there is a copy of PC Formula, the ebook that saved my computer from taking a trip to the technician’s where it would have cost me a fortune no doubt.
This folder is consulted at least once a week, during the time set aside to optimize the computer so it stays nice and fast.
This folder opens up on bootup since I placed a shortcut in the “start folder”
Now of course this can be done also with Start/Open Programs.
I just prefer the desk shortcut which opens when I boot up the computer.
If you prefer to keep all the icons in the Start/Open then it is still a good idea to have everything in folders labeled according to category. That shortens the list of icons and makes for a much tidier look when you open it, as well as being much faster, the computer does not have to load so much “stuff”.
Lets Meet At The Top!
This post was written as a part of a series entitled “How To Succeed”. You can see the go to Part IX here:
The Methods Of Our Business Part 1
Thank You!
I found your post above informative and helpful to everybody to discipline oneself, be organized.
You have a creative way of organizing that I appreciated very much. In addition to, I would like to share with you some organizing tools that might be of interest to you.
I presently using the free objectdock to organize my folders. It’s very cool to experience its look and feel (good to the eyes).
I almost use also the free todolist for almost 2 years to keep organize my daily task and I found it more organized with its simple features.
Thank you Armil for your ideas. I very much appreciate your input.
I have downloaded the freeobjectdock and look forward to trying it out too.
Anyone who would like to try this — just enter freeobjectdock into google search and it will come up on top.
Also the todolist, if you enter it on google as one word, it is very near the top of the list.