It's a new academic year and the kids are back. I always love this time of year because I don't work directly with the kids, so my work load is roughly the same, but everyone seems so much more urgent and energetic around me and it rubs off... It's a good time to make a "new academic year's resolution", and here is mine.
We have a shared folder our department uses to keep track of stuff, but it's grown by leaps and bounds and there are a ton of things in there. I've had cause to look for a couple of things recently and found I couldn't tell where things were, then once I found them, I wasn't sure if what I had found was accurate documentation. What should we do?
Well, I made a proposal which I think was well received. It's a strategy that works best in a shared environment, but also makes a lot of sense if you've inherited documents from a prior employee, which many of you may have done as well.
You start over.
What we plan to do is put the entire contents of the shared folder into an "Archive" folder. When something is needed, the person using it will retreive it from the Archive, put it in the new shared folder and hopefully spruce it up and improve it. However, just the act of moving the document back out of Archive will indicate to the rest of our group that this is recent and valid documentation regarding something.
In a year's time, we'll have a living, breathing shared folder again. At that point, we can pitch the obviously old stuff if we want, or just burn it off to CD or even just leave it in Archive.
You can use the same strategy with your My Documents. Just be careful not to move any of your system folders in there, specifically "Mail", "Favorites", "wIntegrate" (that's a Datatel preferences folder), or "Firefox". If you move these, you will break something on your computer!!! Most everything else can be moved into Archive.
Two final tips:
1. If you still have an MMCLNT32 folder in your My Documents, you can delete it. It was for the old version of MeetingMaker.
2. You'll want to do a clean backup, since you've just made a fundamental change to your My Documents. I plan to explain that in the next post.
Comments (1)
When I remember to do it, building date info. into filenames has been very useful when deciding what is obsolete.
Posted by Ann Sheffield | August 26, 2008 11:40 AM
Posted on August 26, 2008 11:40