You probably have a laptop or desktop computer loaded with files. Students usually hoard tons of videos, music, photos and of course, regular files such as Word documents, PDFs and presentations.

Here’s an experiment: Turn to a low-data lifestyle (LDL). Let’s try to pack our entire life in under 10GB.

4 Reasons to have a LDL

1. Performance Gain: It is a known fact that a hard drive with less data with run faster as it is less fragmented with data, and living life with as little electronic data as possible aids in having a better computing experience.

2. Portability: My ultimate goal is to take my data on the road and be independent of a computer. I want to be able to take my most important data on a thumb drive and walk over to another computer, and feel like I never left home.

3. Back Up Security: A smaller drive is easier to backup and it’s possible to maintain several backups in different forms with ease. I can move my most important data on to an external drive within an hour in case of an emergency. I can back up all my data online for very little money at low cost of bandwidth and time.

4. Focus on What’s Important: Eliminating the unnecessary is common productivity gospel to be spread far and wide. By cutting your files to the essentials, you’ll not only be free of a chaotic mess, but also value the things you have more.

Step One: Clean Up Your Harddrive

The initial step to take is to declare war upon the enormous amount of data that’s occupying your hard drive. For some, this task may be daunting, but it takes a few hours at most to do - in the worst case.

The goal in this step is to eliminate data you basically don’t know, or simply forgot about. It’s about finding old piles of junk and saying “Hey, I forgot I even had that”.

• Analyze Your Drive: Identifying Junk isn’t always easy on a hard drive, which is why I recommend using a utility such as Disk Utility X (Mac) or Sequoia View (Windows). These apps allow you to graphically see what’s taking up all the space on your hard drive. Identify the big chunks, and eliminate what you don’t need anymore. Often, this will be some old videos, or surprisingly huge project files. I once found an iMovie project that was 4GB in size that I had totally forgotten about and could safely discard.

• Uninstall old apps: Once in a while, you’ll find that you’ve installed a bunch of new apps that fill up your hard drive. More often than not I’ll have some old game or shareware app that I didn’t like, finished using or for which the trial expired. Time to to get rid of these. The easiest way to uninstall apps is to use the built-in Add-Remove Programs tool for Windows, to be found in the Control Panel. On a Mac, I suggest using AppZapper or the free alternative AppTrap that actually lives as a preference pane on your Mac. This ensures you remove any excess data on the Mac. While this whole step doesn’t directly help our cause, as you’ll see, it helps in keeping things tidy and under control.

Streamline Your Digital World (With Three Folders)

This is a key We need to rethink our digital lives, and the way we organize them. On a wild guess, how many folders on your computer contain any of your important data?

For most, it’s a lot. Their stuff is strewn all over the drive in vague places and the “My Documents” folder is just a huge mess, cluttered with folders you didn’t create yourself in the first place.

Here’s the thing.

You need to take control of your folder setup, as I’ve extensively covered in this article.

Pruning your life to just three or four folders gives you the freedom of mentally junking everything else. Leave it to the OS, and stop worrying about it. In case of fire, take these three folders and run.

Change The Way You Think About Data

The final step in order to pursue a low-data lifestyle is to change the way you handle data every day. Every file that isn’t half as important to you as the most important file isn’t worth the disk space.

Trash videos once you’ve seen them. Or archive them externally.

Cleanup your photos. Trash the blurries, the embarrassments, and duplicates. You don’t need 4 shots of yourself grinning in front of the Eiffel Tower.

Scan documents at the lowest quality necessary. You don’t need your tax report at a pristine 400dpi resolution. It’s a tax report.

It’s all about getting yourself to value the disk space, and instill an unconscious aversion to hoarding files.

I have more than 10GB of data

That’s bound to happen. Some people have extensive photo libraries, or videos, or huge iTunes collections. Still, the most important part of your life, the Reference folder, shouldn’t be much more than 10GB in the worst case. If so, you’re life is way too complex, or you’re scared of loosing data.

Just keep in mind: A secure backup system that works (meaning: check regularly whether it’s functional and easy to retrieve data) will help you stop worrying about data loss. I love my Time Machine feature in Mac OS X.

I’d like to hear from you: What kind of data do you hoard, and why? Am I the only one feeling this urge to keep my life portable enough to pack up and run within minutes?

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GWD = Getting Water Drunk.

It’s old wisdom that water is a good thing. The major chunk of our body mass is comprised of water, it is the basis for all life, and it’s a no-calorie refreshment that’s freely available to people like you and me.

Look around yoruself. If you ahd to drink water right now, would there be a bottle within reach?

I’m not referring to the climax scene in Signs, where glasses of water should be distributed around the house in order to defeat the aliens, but I am referring to your water habit. Keeping a bottle handy at all times is a hard habit to build, but all the more an important one.

Make it serious fun by choosing a nice bottle, keeping chilled water ready in the fridge and load up on the resources below for reasons to drink more water and how to do it.

11 steps to increase your water intake

20 practical tips for drinking more water

How much water do I need?

9 reasons to drink more water and how to build the water habit

Funny Video about drinking more water

10 reasons to drink more water

My personal system for drinking water is fairly simple: Keep at least a litre of water around you at all times, and drink at every transition in our work day (when changing the subject you’re studying, when moving from one class to the next, when going from computer to writing on paper, when coming from the bathroom, etc.).

It’s that easy. And the benefits are enormous. I think of it as a flush for the system, increasing the turnover of nutrients in the body and thus keeping yourself clean and healthy.

I notice I use the bathroom more, obviously, but I also feel calmer, my skin has begun to glow and I’ve ditched coke and co.

Happy drinking!

Just a quick tip today.

A course at college usually cuts itself down into reading the textbook, a writing assignment or applying theory to problems.

Here’s something I’m going to try this semester. I’ll write my exam dates/assignment deadlines in my calendar (use approximate ones if you don’t know them yet) and work out the number of weeks left to work for it.

Reverse-Plan

Given the course structure and chapters covered in each session, I plan out units to study right from the start. This gives me a long-term plan. For example, my course covers 7 chapters of my book and I have 10 weeks left until the exam. This tells me that I should be done with reading by week 7, so I have 3 weeks left for memorizing and refining my understanding of what I learnt.

This method is a good way to make sure you’ll never run short of time. Since you worked your way backwards through time, You know when to begin at the latest. Lets say another course has less credits, covers just 3 chapters and I have 10 weeks left. This time, I know that I can prioritize other subjects without feeling bad about the one I’m not studying right now.

Routine

One simple trick I’ll apply is to study the same subject at the same time each week. As haphazard as a student lifestyle can be, I think getting into a regular routine is a powerful tool for getting work done and enjoying spare time guilt-freely.

Write it down

To make this simplest of tricks functional, set yourself deadlines for getting done. I like to set these to Sundays, when I have my weekly reviews. I then check whether I’m behind on any reading or writing a chapter in my paper, and then look in the week ahead to find time to get it done.

The second step is to set the exact chunks of time you’ll get units done. You probably won’t be able to strictly follow this, but setting aside the time will give you an overview of whether you’re overloaded with work.

I’ve been exploring a lot of folder systems for filing and processing work over the past year, and here’s what I’ve been sticking with for a few months now, and it works well.

I’ve also been asked by readers who read this popular filing system article by me on Productivity501 about my folder setup seen in screenshots.

Let’s take a look at the steps to make this folder system.

The Folders

I have three folders I use for ALL my work on the computer: Inbox, Active Projects and Reference.

You can name these as you like, since Active Projects correspond to what you may know as “Pending” and Reference is often named “Archive”. It really doesn’t matter as long as you get the meaning of each of these folders.

Inbox collects all incoming stuff. Active Projects holds files you need to be working on currently and Reference is your long term storage. I have an A-Z folder system about which you can read in the aforementioned article.

All folders are created freshly in the Home folder of my computer.

Sidebar Setup

Since all my work resides in these folders, I don’t really want to see my home folder anymore. I access photos and music through iPhoto and iTunes, and I don’t watch movies on the computer. Thus, the home folder becomes somewhat redundant.

I only need access to my three folders, which I have dragged to the sidebar. This allows me to eliminate the Home folder, which contains folders like Documents or Downloads, which I don’t need but can’t delete either.

Icons

To make my three folders look a bit nicer, I used some nice GTD Leopard icons.

To change the icons of my new folders, you just click the icon file, hit Command-C to copy it, right-click on the folder you want to patch, choose Get Info…, click on the icon in the top left, and hit Command-V to drop the icon.

See the photostrip below for a closer look.

Control Incoming Streams

The last step to make this system functional is to get all incoming files to automatically go to your new Inbox.

In most Applications such as Mail, Firefox, Safari and Xtorrent (the ones I use most to download things) you can choose the downloads folder in Preferences. Just set this to point to your new Inbox.

That’s it. It’s a simple setup, and it’s a way of simplifying your computers life down to just three folders. In a future episode: How to live life in under 10 Gigabytes.