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.

Picture this: You’ve been given a writing assignment. You go home, fire up Word, and stare at the blinking cursor waiting for input.

You somehow crank up a working title for your paper and think: “Hey, I should format this at 24pt.”

“Let’s make this Arial.”

And sure enough, you’ll find yourself lost in toying around with Microsoft’s wonderful Word. Here are the tools I use, which complete each other to form a pretty solid workflow.

Continue Reading

GTD for Students is a mysterious thing: It works very well on it’s own, but hits it’s boundaries hard in the academic world. In fact, it works so well that it’s worth keeping for students.

In this post I’ll try to show you how you can implement GTD around a term paper assignment. Continue Reading

Getting Things Done is a philosophy and methodology propagated by David Allen and his book of the same name.

Cal Newport from Study Hacks seems to be a pundit on this topic related to students already, but I felt there was some scope for expansion on how to implement GTD for students. Continue Reading