My mother has the view that cleaning the house is ‘therapeutic’. I run a pretty clean and ordered flat, but I can’t claim getting busy scrubbing the dishes and hovering my carpet gives me such a feeling of wellbeing. That was until I spent a few hours decluttering my desktop.
Every time I booted up my iMac and MacBook, I was faced with dozens of folders (which often stored a variety of sub folders). I’m sure that subconsciously, such a mass of folders, representing different areas of my professional work and personal pursuits were having a negative effect on the start to my working day. I led a pretty minimal life and have never been much of a hoarder (my tiny flat ensures I’m not a collector in any case). So it’s pretty surprising that I’ve allowed my desktops to resemble such a disordered mess. So I resolved to declutter. And I also aimed to delete files which have served their purpose and who will never see the light of day again.
My education on all things web related has led me to undertake all manner of online courses. Enrolling on sites such as lynda.com, CodeSchool, Treehouse and Udemy gives you access to literally thousands of supporting exercise files and images. I guess I was lazy and just saved everything to my desktop. Additionally, I committed the cardinal sin of saving my ongoing projects on my desktop. It just seemed easier to navigate to my desktop. Which is pretty stupid and very bad practice. All kinds of personal stuff were also saved on the desktop and these files where ultimately ‘homeless’, without being saved in an ordered fashion.
So I allocated a full afternoon to reorganize all my file structure and use a root folder called ‘Documents’. I very much recommend it my friends. During the subsequent hours, I managed to delete over 52,000 files from both my iMac and MacBook. The majority of these were saved on my desktop. I was ruthless. If in doubt, the file was deleted. Projects were backed up on my portable drive in a systematic manner. Files were also saved on the cloud and I can’t emphasis how satisfying this process was.
The result of all this labour? A desktop with a single folder called ‘Misc’ which will store files which are required on a short-term basis. I feel a glowing sense of satisfaction. My file structure is now organized and it’s a joy to boot up my devices. My mind is not cluttered due to facing rows and columns of folders. A tidy desktop leads to a happy Mac. You must try it. It was a most productive afternoon.