Organize My Documents

I have all kinds of files in my My Documents folder--from last week's budget report to three-year-old letters to my mom. How do I find a specific file?

Rather than treating My Documents as your catchall folder, think of it as the root of a system of folders. >>TIP Create other folders inside it, and possibly other folders inside those; then save files to the appropriate My Documents subfolders.

You may want to separate personal files and work files, for example. Or you might create separate folders for each work project. Perhaps you prefer to organize your work files by month or quarter. A time-based system makes archiving or deleting old files simpler.

Want a concrete example? Inside my PC's My Documents folder is a subfolder called Answer Line, and inside that are subfolders for the column in each recent issue of PC World (I've archived older issues to a CD-R disc). Other articles I've written get their own subfolders in My Documents; I keep separate subfolders for personal files and for financial documents as well.

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