Life Tips Daily

If you spend a lot of time on the computer, either at work or at home, you may find that you become stressed and disorganized when you can’t find files or documents that you’re looking for. The naming system you used made sense at the time, as did the location you saved it to, but now, for the life of you, you can’t recall what you were thinking (or what you were drinking!).

Here’s today’s tip to help you feel more in control of your clutter:

Clean both desktops
There is of course the physical desktop, where your computer keyboard and screen sit upon if you have a desktop computer. Some laptop owners sit at a desk at least occasionally, though that is perhaps not the general rule. Either way, make sure the surface on which your computer rests is clean: no post it notes mocking you with things you have to remember, no empty drink bottles, food plates, no stray pens and pencils everywhere. You may have to bring out some surface cleaner to clean your newly discovered (and likely dusty) surface.

Once your physical desktop is neat and clean, move on to your computer’s desktop, the one that shows up when you boot up the computer. If you have a lot of icons on this desktop, the running of your computer will be slowed down and that is just one of the frustrations that you can avoid by keeping your desktop icons to a minimum. A suggestion would be to keep the number of icons on your desktop to less than twenty, but you may have a different preference. Although it can seem that you’ll be saving time by saving your important documents to the desktop, over time you’ll find that so many documents become “important” for various reasons and searching through is a bit of a nightmare. So even if you have to shuttle these documents off to a folder called Important under My Documents, this setup will allow you to scan through the list of documents faster than if they are fat icons on your desktop.

Give these a try and share in the comments how they work for you. With respect to clearing the desktop, do you have any surefire ideas, tips or tricks?