If you are like me, you have a huge amount of files sitting around in your computer. When you need something specific, more likely than not, you hope you have saved it with a name that you remember and can search for. But many times this doesn't happen and over years, you have way too many files that don't belong wherever you have them stored. I follow a few of the blogs from the quick and dirty family. One of them I was recently listening to, get-it-done-guy talked about how to organize your electronic files to make them easier to find. I loved his suggestion and have started to use it myself.
I am currently working on my Psychology Honours Thesis and I have been numbering all the journal articles and saving them in my thesis folder. But now I have a better way of doing this. Not only are all these files in one folder, the pdf journal articles all have the name Honours01, honours02, etc. It is 01, because if you just put 1, then you will find Honours1 and Honours10 next to each other. Adding the 0 avoids this complication.
Another thing I am doing is, working on a word document where are note down all the ideas I get from the papers. I write the number if the paper, then have intro, hypothesis, methods, results, conclusion, limitations sections and IN MY OWN WORDS, and in bullet points, write down what each paper is about. Each different day I work on it, I save the file with the date. But using get-it-done-guy's technique, I have started a new format. Honours_Proposal_2010_09_15.doc for example. This way, if I look for the files, they are sorted in chronological order.
I am hoping this will be helpful to me in the long run.
Thank you get-it-done-guy. Please read the blog I've linked. It is quite useful
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