Digital Spring Cleaning

Despite the fact that we do not have spring season in the Philippines, it is just good to clean and/or organize (this time) our digital life.

Honestly, I am lazy af to clean things on a regular basis since I really suck at scheduling. This happens often when I get caught doing things that require a pretty good amount of focus (or am I just giving reasons for my laziness?)

# Bit of My Digital History

If you didn’t know, I started my computer life at the early age of 9/10? I just remember I was in grade 5, 1997-ish, when I fell in love with computers. But with the lack of internet, I only grew up into video games and not programming. I just picked up programming during college days when I was actually bought a laptop by my parents.

We tackled a bunch of languages even being an Electronics Engineering student, like C++, Turbo C, and Java. But I didn’t felt good about those languages until our thesis days where I got help with a friend, an IT student, using VB.Net. I slightly understood it better than the latter ones. It was also the start of programming in C#.Net for my Windows Phone to make apps.

# Files

Being into the Windows environment, files did matter and I actually had free 15GB of SkyDrive (OneDrive now) where I put my files in. While working, I actually preferred to use my laptop since it got more power than what they provide.

Now with more than 8 years, my cloud is cluttered and having to use extensive apps, software, and services means there are alot more files scattered everywhere.

Now let’s go organizing.

# Organizing

# Personal Files

I suck at organizing back in the day that I actually did not create folders to group similar files.

Now I slowly group and organize files and folders properly. Starting with the Documents and Pictures folder. Although my Documents folder still sucks since Windows games create their own saves folder which makes the list longer and hard to group.

In the Pictures folder, I began grouping photos and videos based on Year > Month, while other non-sense images went into an Archives folder or Others folder.

For my Personal folder, I grouped files by type and use:

Then the files go into further folders like inside Stream Assets:

# Work Files

This seems easier to organize by grouping files based on the responsibility/project, so I just went into choosing a better way to name work files. Continue reading below.

# File Naming

I started renaming work files since collaboration and sharing may require some context on the date and file versions:

# Documents (docx, pdf, pptx, xlsx, etc)

YYYY-MM-DD_TYPE_File_Name_Version#.extension
2022-03-29_REPORT_Some_Incident_With_The_Clock.docx

# Graphics/Media Files (jpg, png, psd, mp3, mp4 etc)

I use the dash and underscore interchangeably but I am more inclined to use underscore for consistency:

file_name_tags.extension or tags_file_name.extension or both
ad_magic_stylus_square_720x720.png
open_graph_styled_frame_template.ai

# Codes

Depending on the programming language, I strictly use their naming conventions/standard for clarity and consistency. But with other types like json, txt, and other asset files:

file_name.extension
products_list.json
secret_codes.txt

# Cloud

All these files now live in the cloud, OneDrive specifically, and reformatting or changing machine makes it easier to get the files again. Less hassle and worries especially when a big part of my life depends on some important files.

I am subscribed to Microsoft 365 Personal which offers 1TB of cloud storage and as of now I use around 48%.

Sign up to OneDrive and get 500MB additional storage space.

# Share Your Way

So that’s about my file naming and folder organization and it is still on-going as of this writing. How do you organize your digital life? Share it on the comments below.