Organizing Your Mac

As an author, nuclear waste consultant and, packrat—information junkie, my office and at times my computer is a mess. I have developed, just during my 50-year professional career, three major different “paper” cataloging filing systems. These ranged from using punch cards as the tracking medium for my file cabinets for storing document abstracted contents and location, to trying the same thing with FileMaker Pro [FMP].  None of these ever outlasted the time I need to maintain them after the point that I’d lost my secretary and clerical help. I’m working on an all computer based paperless system, but time will tell whether I’ll stick to it. My FMP database is complexly designed and a small pilot run, indexing several handfuls of documents worked. For the rest, I’ve accumulated ca. 2000 references for my new textbook, and am still at the accumulating documents (PDF and MSW) as I write my new sections.

Meanwhile, thanks to Tonya Engst of Tidbits fame and the well used and admired Take Control books; I’ve found and adopted parts of her four simple techniques that provide an oasis of order on my Mac.

Step 1. Clear the Desktop — I did this last night after I read about slowing Macinish performance in another Tidbit or was it in MacWorld. I’ve cut the average number of desktop items in my 22” screen from over a 100 to under three-dozen, hurrah for step one.

Tonya suggests you Take 10 minutes to clear your desktop. {It took 30, don’t ask — I’d been using the desktop as a detailed staging area for four or five different projects. Indeed some of my desktop folders were duplicates I’d staged to the dock — duh.)

Follow these steps: Close any open windows. Then, click the desktop to be sure you’re in the Finder. From the Finder menu, choose Preferences. Clear the first three checkboxes in the Preferences window’s General pane. {Tonya, I chose to leave the top two checked since I get and send lots of traffic where extensions matter.}

You can access these items from the Go menu or Sidebar, so they don’t need to clutter your soon-to-be tranquil desktop. Close the Preferences window. Make a new folder on your desktop.

Choose New Folder from the File menu. — Name the folder In Box. Move each item on your desktop to an appropriate folder — perhaps your Documents folder or a subfolder of your Documents folder — or put it in the new In Box folder. (You may wish to create a folder in your Documents folder, called My Documents. I did this because my software automatically put so many support items in Documents, I could hardly find my own stuff.) At the end of ten minutes, drag your new In Box folder into the Documents (or My Documents) folder.

Step 2. Customize the Toolbar

Identify up to six files (or folders) that you often want to open for reference. For example, files I (Tonya) often want to open:

§ My “to do” list

§ Several style guides

§ The phone list for my son’s school

§ My In Box folder

Add these items to your toolbar. But first, clear any unwanted items from the toolbar with these steps:

• Open a Finder window. (Press Command/N or choose “New Finder Window” from the File menu.) If you don’t see a toolbar, click the oval button at the upper right of the Finder window.
• Remove unnecessary items from the toolbar by Command/dragging them off. (You are not deleting these items, just removing their buttons from the toolbar.) You may wish to shorten the items file name so it reads well for display on the toolbar.
• Drag each item to a desirable toolbar location. You should see a green plus badge appear on the pointer when it is over an allowed location. If you don’t like the location of an item on the toolbar, move it by Command/dragging it.

To further customize your toolbar, choose Customize Toolbar from the View menu. In particular, experiment with the Show pop-up menu at the bottom of the customization dialog.

Step 3. Put Projects on the Sidebar

It’s time to separate the wheat of your active projects from the chaff of the other stuff on your Mac. Put folders for active projects in the Sidebar so you can find them instantly and save new files into them easily. Here are some examples of folders that might go in the Sidebar:

• Holiday Letter

• Finances

• Summer Brochure

You might also, for example, put iPhoto in your Sidebar, if a current project is to work with photos tracked by iPhoto. To clean up your Sidebar and add items, follow these steps:

Doc’s Note: I don’t like the sidebar so have almost all my window configured to hit it. Instead I’ve chosen to use Apple’s dock as an alterative for launching active projects. See step 5.

• Open a Finder Window. If the toolbar is showing, you should also see the Sidebar at the left. Items above the horizontal line in the Sidebar are put there by your Mac. You may wish to remove some items in order to make this area smaller; you can drag them out or remove them by clearing their checkboxes in the Sidebar pane of the Finder Preferences window.
• Remove items from the bottom of the Sidebar that don’t represent current projects by dragging them out of the Sidebar. You may wish to relocate default items, like Pictures and Movies, to the toolbar. (Drag the item off the Sidebar; then from your user folder, Command-Drag it to the toolbar.)
• Drag each project folder to the Sidebar and drop it in the desired location. Notice that a horizontal line shows where the folder will go after you drop it. If the Sidebar is the wrong width, resize it by dragging the vertical divider at its right. If space is at a premium, consider dragging the line almost all the way left – your Mac will show a tool tip for each icon as you move the pointer over it.
• Position and size the window as you want it to appear each time you open a new Finder window, then close the window to make your changes stick. Here are some tips for working with projects on the Sidebar:
• To open an item from a project, start by clicking its project folder in the Sidebar. When you save a file, use the Sidebar in the Save dialog to switch to the correct folder quickly. When you save a file, if you need to work on it not in relation to its project but in relation to the fact that you just saved it, save to your desktop — press Command-D to switch to the Save dialog to the desktop instantly.
• To move an item to a folder on the Sidebar, drag it to the folder and drop it when the folder is highlighted.

Step 4. Combat Clutter

Follow this clutter-destroying process periodically, perhaps once per day or week: If a file is on your desktop, file it correctly or stick it in your In Box folder for later review. If an item in your Sidebar (or dock) no longer represents an active project, remove it. If you have too many active projects, decide which ones aren’t front-burner active and move them off your Sidebar.

Step 5. Customize the Dock, doc’s alternative to using the sidebar.

The Apple dock is divided into two portions. On the left hand side you can place, for fast access, your most often used applications. The right hand side is reserved of what is loosely called documents. These items can be folders, actual documents and web links. The dock stores the aliases of the items stored and therefore like the sidebar can be changed to meet your current accessibility needs.

Doc’s List

Apple’s help notes tell you how — I here share just the barest summary

• To add a file or folder, drag its icon from a Finder window to the right hand side of the Dock
• To add an application, drag its icon from a Finder window to the left side of the Dock
• To arrange or rearrange items in the Dock, drag them into the order you prefer. (This can be tricky since icons vary in grab-ability, so don’t give up)

If this is enough to get you moving use Google — Check Organizing Your Mac.

More Organizing Tips from Tonya

To find out more, read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, which will inspire you to think about organization, and Matt Neuburg’s eBooks Take Control of Customizing Tiger, and Take Control of Customizing Panther, which explain many nuances of Finder customization.

PS

Lest I forget, I customize many of my folders by either adding a one-word description or by inserting an image that represent their contents. The tools I use for this are FolderBrander (text) and IconCompo (images). Check the MacUpdate site for the latest versions.

Based on Material by Tanya Engst

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