There comes a time in the life of every student
when inevitably, they'll lose some very important
school file and then they'll have to make an excuse
to their teacher.
"My flashdrive got lost,"
or "My dog ate my homework.
"Please do not consider the fact that
"dogs are not allowed in the dorms."
That kinda thing.
But this is the rule, and
you can be the exception to that rule.
Now, when I was in high school,
I was often a bonehead who would just
put my on flash drives and then inevitably
lose those flash drives.
But when I got to college, I got my act together
and I can brag truthfrully about this,
I never once arrived to a class and realized
I didn't have an assignment I needed to bring with me
because of the system I built.
So in this quick video,
I wanna show you system for organizing my files
that I built over the four years I was in college.
We'll talk about the best ways to store your files
so you always have access to them,
the actual hierarchy of folders I built in my computer
so everything was really easy to find,
and also ways to organize your paper files.
So, first let's talk about file storage.
Now whether you have one computer
or multiple computers,
I recommend using a cloud storage system.
And the one I've been using for multiple, multiple years
is Dropbox.
I absolutely love Dropbox.
And their free option comes with two gigabytes of storage
which is pretty much good for anybody who isn't
gonna be doing design or a lot of photography or video work.
And they offer apps for
almost every platform out there,
as well as app that is accessible through the browser.
So keeping your files stores in Dropbox
means that even if you forgot to bring your computer
to class for some reason,
or hey, maybe it's dead,
you can go to a computer lab in the building,
access the file right on the browser
and print it out.
Now in doing some research for this video,
I did some poking into other cloud storage options,
and I wanna say that Google Drive is also
a really strong competitor to Dropbox
and it might even work better for you.
Reason being is that Google Docs actually gives you
15 gigabytes as opposed to Dropbox's two
so it's a heck of a lot more free storage
and it also integrates really well
with Google's other products.
So if you already use Gmail or Calendar a lot,
or you like to write papers collaboratively in Google Docs
when you're doing group projects,
then Drive is the perfect option.
Whichever one you choose will give you the option
to organize folders however you like,
and I'd like to submit my own system
as something that will work really well for you.
So in my top level Dropbox directory,
I've got multiple folders that each represent
different areas of my life.
And everything related to school,
goes into my College folder.
My next level folder separates everything by year,
and after that, I have everything separated by class.
Inside of individual class folders,
I usually keep all regular assignments just sitting there,
but projects get their own special folders as well.
This well designed tree structure ensures that
I'm always able to find the files I need right away,
rather than hunting around a giant jumble of files
on my Desktop looking for the right exact name.
Now, the one thing I'll note here,
and this applies to every organizational system you use
is that you have to be constantly vigilant
about keeping it in working order.
It's easy to initially set up
this pristine, well-oiled system,
but then when you're working on an actual paper
and maybe you need to go to bed
or you need to rush off to a class,
it's also really easy to save that document
straight to the Desktop.
And over time, doing this will ensure
that you're gonna have that jumbled mess
you wanted to avoid in the first place.
So be kind to your future self
and make sure you take that extra 30 seconds
to find the correct folder for an assignment
and also give it a name that makes sense.
Speaking of naming files,
I know a lot of students will make multiple copies
of the an assignment because they wanna save all versions.
And the cool thing about Dropbox and also Drive
is it has Version History.
This means that you can actually
log into your Dropbox account
and see previous versions of a file that you've worked on.
If you find that you've screwed up a file
and already saved it,
you can actually roll back to a previous version
and erase those mistakes.
Now let's talk about notes.
I actually don't keep my notes in Dropbox,
and that's because I took almost all of my notes
on Evernote.
The structure of my Evernote account is very similar
to my Dropbox.
I have notebook stacks which represent areas of my life
and then inside those stacks,
there are individual notebooks for classes
or different projects,
or just places I wanna keep notes.
As in example, here's my Classes notebook stack.
I used to have two of these:
one for current classes and one for old classes.
Now all my classes are old, so it's just one.
But as you can see, all of my classes are listed here.
And in each notebook, you'll find all the notes
I took for that class.
Evernote also allows you to put tags on your notes,
so maybe you wanna tag certain notes as lecture notes
and other notes as final exam review.
This allows you to easily filter through all the notes
you have more one class
and find what you're looking for fast.
Now, Evernote also has other features and uses
that can be really beneficial to you as a student.
And I actually wrote a blog post
featuring many of these uses
which you can find by clicking the card right now,
or looking down at the description.
To round out the video, let's talk about paper notes.
So I was kind of a minimalist when I was in college
and I didn't wanna have two many notebooks in my bag.
So I actually got a refillable notebook
which I would use for all my subjects.
I divided the notebook with the same colored flags
that I marked up this book with.
And when I'd run out of paper in one section,
I would just take all of the notes out of it
and add new paper.
The old notes would go into subject specific folders
back in my dorm room
and I always made sure to make page numbers on them
so I could put them back together easily
when I was reviewing at the end of the semester.
And these folders, in turn, were stored in a
black file box that I kept in my dorm room,
but I highly recommend getting one of these
if you don't have one.
So that's in for this video.
Hopefully some of these tips will help you
become a more organized student
which in turn should help you cut down on stress
when the demands of the semester start piling on.
If you enjoyed this video or found it helpful,
then leaving a like is much appreciated
and I will see you next week.
Hey guys, thank you so much for watching this
incredibly exciting video about
file organization.
Yeah.
Well, if you wanna get new videos every single week
about being a more effective student,
you can click that big red subscribe button right there.
I also wrote a book on how to improve your grades
and it's absolutely free,
so if you wanna get a copy,
click the picture of the book and I'll send you one.
You can find notes and a summary of this video
by going to the companion blog post
at the orange logo right there,
and if you missed last week's video,
we talked about Marcus Aurelius'
thoughts on self-discipline.
A lot of people liked that one so definitely check it out.
Lastly, if you got questions or just wanna connect with me,
I'm @TomFrankly on Twitter
or you can leave a comment below.
Thanks for watching.