Over the years I have accumulated this particular physical category of items that I had a strong desire to get organized, but I always hesitated to tackle the task because I knew I may run into trouble with organizing it. Taking on this task turned out to be an excellent experience in organizing because I discovered a significant new scheme in organizing. I would not have made this discovery if I did not go through this experience. I am not sure that I can describe this as a breakthrough, even though that sure does sound appealing. It is though a significant organizing change and improvement that I made. The neatest thing about this discovery is that I have been able to port the concept to my computer file system, and maybe even to other types.

Are you ready? Do you want to know what the discovery is?!!

I have separated types into Personal and Non-Personal. I use the word ‘types’ because this scheme can be applied to almost anything that has the potential to be sorted/categorized this way. This scheme may seem trivial to you, but it is such a huge improvement. It would be even more meaningful to go through the above described experience, and to see the satisfaction in accomplishing an organizing task.  Applying this also leads to follow-on benefits that you will later start to see, like for instance back-ups. It should be a no-brainer that backing up Personal computer documents has a higher priority than backing up Non-Personal computer documents. Personal pictures might be backed up to a space that is different from a back-up space for Non-Personal pictures. It is not just documents that this can apply to!

Here is a screen shot of my computer files illustrating the concept:

Documents – Personal and Non-Personal

The same applies to Videos. In all, this concept has been applied to Documents, Pictures, and Videos:

Pictures and Videos – Personal and Non-Personal