‘The need of gathering, classifying and storing documents often results in employee effectiveness drop, meaning additional costs for the employer.’ – warns DocuSafe, secure media storage company.

In opposition to the popular conviction, that all our computer work can be found and retrieved in ‘just one click’ and that electronic means easy and timesaving, let me say this out loud: classifying and putting in order computer material requires effort. If you have worked on a laptop, tablet or desktop computer for about two years, there is a big chance the device will know more about it’s owner than your spouse! Word, photos, video, notes, PDF and Excel files, personal, business, private and shared… There is tons of data you view and then delete or save every week. Quite often things get lost precisely in the moment you are looking for them and must find very quickly (this is when you have looked through every folder, My Computer, all the drives and still the ‘search’ loop has no idea what you’re talking about).

In order to get your life more organized, here are some good tips to keep your hard drive neat: 1. Drop everything into folders 2. Store all files in one place like My Documents. Organize the folders by category and make subfolders, but beware: you don’t need too many of those, you might be obliged to click through them all if you forget a document’s place.

Moreover, you do not keep all of these files on the computer itself – there are situations when you use the cloud, memory cards or pen-drives. For example when sharing a big presentation containing video and being too big to be send via mail. Or you can choose other storage methods:

Cloud

You can use a cloud to stock pictures or notes, for example when your PC is old and has no space on the drive. In this case, some cloud systems are more efficient than others. As Terrance Gaines explains on LinkedIn – clouds can be divided into cloud storage and cloud synchronization tools. The first are servers keeping all our information in one sole location in the sky, while others like Dropbox, Google Drive and One Drive are classified as content synchronization. This means they copy your files to every used device and then inevitably  clutter your memory storage.

Applications

On line app: Docady, its users can import documents from popular cloud storage services and scan their documents manually into the application. Docady separates documents into major categories like: financial and medical information and supports everything from driver’s licenses and birth certificates to apartment lease agreements, employment contracts and much more. Users can import content from Dropbox, Evernote, Gmail, Google Drive, Yahoo and OneDrive. Also allows to discover important documents which may be ‘lost’ in their email or cloud storage boxes.

Off line app: DBE (Decision Based Education) Useful, when you store most of your data in Power Point slides. Drag and drop these slides into the system in the easiest way with DBE, then make non-linear presentations out of them. The app has a library with photos and videos, to be easily embedded in each slide. This way you can group and store all your content, no matter the type of file or its size.