After finals, the files section of your computer may get a little jumbled. Random PDFs of school material, Google Docs of every study guide ever made and screenshots of notes can be overwhelming, so why not take the winter break to sort your tech out! Below are some areas to tackle before the New Year, allowing you to start with a clean slate!
- Make those folders on Google Docs.
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There’s two Google Docs users; the ones that have a folder for each course, sorted by semester of course! Then there’s the users that scroll through the dozens of recent documents to find what they’re looking for. I’m definitely in the latter half, and although there’s nothing wrong with using Google Docs in this manner, it would be nice to save time looking through all those documents. By sorting your schoolwork into folders, it’s easy to bring up that past bibliography citation used, or that example of an essay you got a 90 on.
- Back up that laptop.
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I have to admit, my mom got me a thumb drive to back up my laptop last year, and I have continued to push it off. Regardless of if you carry a physical backup or use the cloud, just spend 10 minutes to copy everything over. You don’t want to lose those precious university photos due to a broken hard drive!
- Sort through those endless screenshots on your phone.
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Those screenshots of items you find on the internet may not take up much space, but they add up over time. Deleting non-sentimental pictures declutters the space for more memorable moments, and saves time scrolling through endless TikToks to find that one video.
- Delete those PDFs.
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Do you really need eight copies of that one syllabus from 2018? Although it’s a good idea to save your past work, those duplicates take up unnecessary space. Bonus points if you use a file cleaning software after!
After completing these tasks, your workspace (and digital life!) will leave you with a fresh start for the New Year!