How To Organize Your Desktop In Spite Of 100+ Apps

Many computer users have countless icons on their desktop. It usually isn’t their preference to have to search through all these icons to find the application or file they are looking for. They just don’t know how to properly organize their desktop to optimize their time.

Programs for Desktop Organization

Most computer and business tablet users don’t want to spend the time it takes to clean up their desktop. You can use programs such as Belvedere and Hazel that will automatically do this for you. Belvedere is for Windows users and is free. Hazel is for Mac users and costs around $22. Both applications work almost exactly the same way since Belvedere was actually inspired by Hazel.

1. Once you have installed Belvedere, launch the application.
2. You will then create a folder that you will monitor, clean, and organize.
3. Click the ‘+’ button and choose your desktop so that you have easy access to the folder.
4. After the folder is created, you will want to create new rules for how files are organized in each folder.
5. Select the folder that you created on your desktop in the left sidebar and click the ‘+’ button under the Rules section.

The possibilities are endless at this point, you can match files based on:

1. File name
2. Extension
3. Size
4. Modified date
5. Last opened date
6. Date created

Or you can create any combination of these principles to get precise with matching rules. This is just one method used to organize your desktop.

The Do-It-Yourself Desktop Organization Method

You can also do it yourself, and it won’t cost you a penny. Most Windows users don’t realize that you can create a new folder almost anywhere. To do so:

1. Right click your mouse button.
2. Select New and then Folder.
3. Type the name of the folder and there you go!

You can organize your MP3s under My Music on your hard drive or create a folder called Vacation 2011 under My Pictures. The possibilities for organizing your desktop using a logical hierarchy of folders and subfolders are literally endless.

Using Windows Utilities for Desktop Organization

There are a few other do-it-yourself Windows utilities that can be used to help organize your desktop:

1. Using the hotkey combination of Alt plus the Spacebar will launch a free utility called Launchy which allows you to access your files and folders easily.
2. Bulk file renaming using D-FileMU or Renamer allow the user  to rename files like “DCIM002354” without having to rename them manually.  These programs also allow you to change file names to all lowercase or all caps along with many other helpful capabilities.
3. Some Windows users do not like to use a lot of folders to organize their files, so a utility called File Comparator is helpful for them. There is a lightweight program called Commander that you can use to replace Windows Explorer. This program will compare files, swap directories, and rename your files.
4. Often times you have multiple files hidden on your computer with the same name. Commander will consolidate your files and delete unneeded files.

There are many ways to organize your desktop in order to increase productivity. Whether you buy a program to do it for you, like Belvedere or Hazel, or you do it yourself using Windows utilities, you can greatly increase the time it takes you to find the file that you need! 

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