If your PC is a big part of your daily work routine (which, for most office workers, it definitely is) the it is highly important to keep It organized. Your physical workspace, like your office, your desk, and your drawers, need to remain organized, but keeping your digital workspace organized is perhaps even more important. We spoke with TechQuarters, a top Managed Services Provider London business rely on for their IT. They state that your digital workspace includes everything from your desktop, to your file management, your internet browsing practices; it even includes the apps, services and programs you use every day. All of these need to be organised and made efficient.
Organise, organise organise!
To start with, come up with a system for organisation that works best for you. You could start with your computers folders and drives. For example, make sure all images on your PC are stored in the system folder for Images – same goes for Video files, Music & Audio files, etc. Once all these different file types are in the right place, you can start organising them into additional folders and sub-folders – perhaps you want to organise images based on where & when you took them (e.g. Summer 2018); you might have a parent folder for all personal images, and a parent folder for images you need for work, which are further organised into subfolders.
Once all your files are organised in a clear way, you might want to organise your apps and programs. A good tip is to pin your commonly used apps to your taskbar, that way they’re just one click away. For a larger selection of frequently used apps that you don’t need instant access to, you could pin them to your taskbar. TechQuarters told us that as Outsourced IT Support, they find it useful to educate users on how to organise their PC’s files, folders and apps in an efficient way.
De-clutter
Whilst you are organising all of your files, folders and apps, you will probably find some items that you no longer need. In fact, that first step of organising is a great way to take stock of everything that’s on your PC – you will undoubtedly find plenty of things that haven’t been useful to you for a long time; the Downloads folder is the main culprit, and to start with, you should definitely look through it and clear anything you don’t need out of there.
You may have duplicates of files, or old versions of documents, and all manner of digital clutter that you can wipe from your PC. Once you’ve done a manual delete, you should also do a disk cleanup and perhaps even a defragment of your drives – this will all help to eliminate random bits of data filling up on your PC. The great thing is this will also speed up your computer.
Consider external storage
TechQuarters told us that one of the main things they do as part of their London IT Services, is to set users up with external and shared storage, because it is so much more efficient that having everything stored on users’ individual PCs. Putting everything on your PC’s internal drive will not only slow your PC down, but slow down file sharing with your colleagues. TechQuarters recommend using the Cloud to create secure shared and individual drives for users, so they can offload all their storage into the Cloud, which will speed up their PC a great deal. It is recommended that your PC’s internal storage is reserved for hosting your operating system and your programs and application – files like documents, images, audio and video would be best kept in the Cloud, or on an external hard drive.