How to Organize Reference Files
Get-It-Done Guy has a simple way to unify your scattered files and bookmarks to create a comprehensive reference system using a mix of the cloud, shortcuts, folders, and sharing.
Get-It-Done Guy podcast listener Corrie writes:Â
“I am a school psychologist. I have a ton of resources that I often need to refer to—bookmarks, articles saved on my hard drive, resources in a Google Drive, and stuff in Dropbox. When someone says, ‘Hey, we need a behavior plan for this kid who is stealing,’ I need to quickly find all the relevant info. How do I do this? And how do I get everything into that resource without going through every single file and entering it on a Google Doc?”
Hi, Corrie! I feel your pain. I’ve been using the internet for so long that some of my files are stored on stone tablets. As you can imagine, it’s hard to share them. Not only are they heavy, but the dust on the stones dries out my hands. I use hand creme to protect my sensitive skin, and then my hands get so slippery the stone tablets slip through my grasp, fall, and shatter on the floor. There’s probably a deep life lesson here.
In episode 543, How to Collaborate on Multiple Projects with Multiple People, we discussed creating master project documents. The master document includes a discussion of the project and links to related files. Master project documents keep everyone focused on just the files that are currently active.
Your situation is different. You want to be able to find the hundreds and hundreds of files and bookmarks. But you only need to find any given file when you need it.Â
Search May Do the Trick
This may be a case where simply searching is all the mechanism you need. Give your files descriptive names like “behavior plan for youth stealing” and a search for “behavior plan” or “stealing” will turn up that file.
Do the same with your bookmarks, and you can just search in your bookmarks list to find the resources you need.
This makes it easy for you to find resources. It doesn’t help you share those resources with others, however.
Gather Your Files in One Place
Using a cloud syncing service like Dropbox, Box.com, pCloud.com, or Sync.com, you can solve all the problems at once. Yes, all the problems. At once. Eat your heart out, Albert Einstein!
For the rest of this episode, I’ll talk about a mythical cloud service called “SyncBox.” Just substitute the name of whatever cloud sync service you really use. (Or send me a whole bunch of money and I’ll happily feature the cloud provider you want me to in future episodes).
Design Your Reference Structure
First design your reference structure. Think about how you want to find relevant links and files. You might have files about specific behaviors like Stealing or Distracted or Fighting. You might also have files about underlying causes or syndromes: ADHD, Psychopathy, Broken Homes, Changeling.
Create a folder for each of these topics. You can also group related topics into folders of higher level topics.
For example, you might have a folder called Behaviors. Inside that folder are three folders: Stealing, Distracted, and Fighting. You might have another folder called Syndromes with four folders: ADHD, Psychopathy, Broken Homes, and Changeling.
First design your reference structure. Think about how you want to find relevant links and files.
Name and group these folders according to how you think you’ll actually want to find the information. So you may want to keep a diary for a few weeks where you record what information you end up needing, and what you’re thinking when you need it. You might find out, for example, that you rarely look up information by Syndrome and often look it up by Biological Cause. In that case, you would want a containing folder called Biological Cause.
Drag and Drop Your Knowledge
You now have the Master Architecture of Your Knowledge in place! Bwah hah hah hah ha! Now it’s time to put the knowledge itself in the right buckets.
Simply drag your existing files into the folders where they belong. You can organize them all without getting a separate link for each one, as you’d have to do if you were copying links into a master document.
Voilá! You’re getting organized at light speed! Until …
Make Copies to File in Multiple Places
You find a file called The Effects of ADHD on Stealing. You really want to file that in both folders ADHD and Stealing. On your desktop computer, you could put the file in one folder, create an alias to it, and drag the alias into the other folder. But file aliases like that don’t work with cloud platforms.
So instead, make a copy of the file. Drop one copy in ADHD and the other in Stealing. The copy will have the word Copy added to the end. Leave it there, and drag the copy into the other folder.
You’ll put a copy of the file in both folders. When you later find the information, the word “copy” tells you the original is somewhere else. You can use search to find all the copies with that name.
Turn Bookmarks Into Web ShortcutsÂ
Bookmarks to web pages are a bit trickier, since they live in your browser’s bookmarks. But never fear! All modern browsers let you create a desktop shortcut to a web site. On the Mac, just drag the address bar of a site onto your desktop and it turns into a desktop file. Drag that file into place in your reference hierarchies and you’ve filed the bookmark in that same topic folder.
To drag a Google Doc into a reference folder, open it in your web browser. Then just drag the shortcut from the browser bar. Or you can choose File ▸ Download as… in Google Docs to download a copy of your Google Doc as a Word or Excel file. Then put that file into your reference folders.
Now celebrate! When you need to find resources on a topic, just navigate to the folder on that topic. Since you created the topic folders aligned with how you will refer to them, navigation will be easy! Inside the topic folder, you’ll find all the relevant files and shortcuts, organized with simply drag-and-drop.
Share Your Knowledge
If you want to share files with someone, you can do that on an as-needed basis. Most cloud services let you right-click any file stored in your SyncBox and copy a sharing link that you can then give to a colleague. You can share a single file or a whole folder. Even if you can’t do it directly from your file browser, you can go to your account on your SyncBox’s site and get a sharing link from there.
Rest easy, Corrie! This will take a little work to set up, but it gives you a unified way to organize all your files and shortcuts so you can find them easily. Your folder names provide the organization, and anything inside can be dragged, dropped, or copied with ease.
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. Preparing a house to sell? Getting the kids ready to head to college? A Get-it-Done group can help you finish the project. Learn more atÂ
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Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Organize computer image courtesy of Shutterstock.
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.Â
