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there comes a time in the life of every student when inevitably, they'lllose some very important school file and then they'll have to make an excuse to their teacher. "my flashdrive got lost," or "my dog ate my homework. "please do not consider the fact that "dogs are not allowed in the dorms." that kinda thing.

but this is the rule, and you can be theexception to that rule. now, when i was in high school, i was often a bonehead who would just put my on flash drives and then inevitably lose those flash drives. but when i got to college, i got my act together and i can bragtruthfrully about this, i never once arrivedto a class and realized

i didn't have an assignment i needed to bring with me because of the system i built. so in this quick video, i wanna show you systemfor organizing my files that i built over the four years i was in college. we'll talk about the best ways to store your files so you always have access to them, the actual hierarchy of folders i built in my computer so everything was really easy to find,

and also ways to organize your paper files. so, first let's talk about file storage. now whether you have one computer or multiple computers, i recommend using a cloud storage system. and the one i've been using for multiple, multiple years is dropbox. i absolutely love dropbox. and their free option comes with two gigabytes of storage

which is pretty much good for anybody who isn't gonna be doing design or a lot of photography or video work. and they offer apps for almost every platform out there, as well as app that isaccessible through the browser. so keeping your files stores in dropbox means that even if you forgot to bring your computer to class for some reason, or hey, maybe it's dead,

you can go to a computerlab in the building, access the file right on the browser and print it out. now in doing someresearch for this video, i did some poking into other cloud storage options, and i wanna say that google drive is also a really strong competitor to dropbox and it might even work better for you. reason being is that google docs actually gives you

15 gigabytes as opposedto dropbox's two so it's a heck of a lot more free storage and it also integrates really well with google's other products. so if you already usegmail or calendar a lot, or you like to write papers collaboratively in google docs when you're doing group projects, then drive is the perfect option. whichever one you choosewill give you the option

to organize folders however you like, and i'd like to submit my own system as something that will work really well for you. so in my top level dropbox directory, i've got multiple folders that each represent different areas of my life. and everything related to school, goes into my college folder. my next level folder separates everything by year,

and after that, i have everything separated by class. inside of individual class folders, i usually keep all regularassignments just sitting there, but projects get their own special folders as well. this well designed treestructure ensures that i'm always able to find the files i need right away, rather than hunting around a giant jumble of files on my desktop looking for the right exact name. now, the one thing i'll note here,

and this applies to every organizational system you use is that you have to be constantly vigilant about keeping it in working order. it's easy to initially set up this pristine, well-oiled system, but then when you're working on an actual paper and maybe you need to go to bed or you need to rush off to a class, it's also really easy to save that document

straight to the desktop. and over time, doing this will ensure that you're gonna have that jumbled mess you wanted to avoid in the first place. so be kind to your future self and make sure you take that extra 30 seconds to find the correctfolder for an assignment and also give it a name that makes sense. speaking of naming files,

i know a lot of students will make multiple copies of the an assignment because they wanna save all versions. and the cool thing aboutdropbox and also drive is it has version history. this means that you can actually log into your dropbox account and see previous versions of a file that you've worked on. if you find that you'vescrewed up a file and already saved it,

you can actually roll back to a previous version and erase those mistakes. now let's talk about notes. i actually don't keep my notes in dropbox, and that's because i took almost all of my notes on evernote. the structure of my evernote account is very similar to my dropbox. i have notebook stacks which represent areas of my life

and then inside those stacks, there are individual notebooks for classes or different projects, or just places i wanna keep notes. as in example, here's myclasses notebook stack. i used to have two of these: one for current classesand one for old classes. now all my classes are old, so it's just one. but as you can see, all of my classes are listed here.

and in each notebook, you'll find all the notes i took for that class. evernote also allows you to put tags on your notes, so maybe you wanna tag certain notes as lecture notes and other notes as final exam review. this allows you to easily filter through all the notes you have more one class and find what you're looking for fast. now, evernote also hasother features and uses

that can be really beneficial to you as a student. and i actually wrote a blog post featuring many of these uses which you can find by clicking the card right now, or looking down at the description. to round out the video, let's talk about paper notes. so i was kind of a minimalist when i was in college and i didn't wanna have two many notebooks in my bag. so i actually got a refillable notebook

which i would use for all my subjects. i divided the notebook with the same colored flags that i marked up this book with. and when i'd run out ofpaper in one section, i would just take all of the notes out of it and add new paper. the old notes would go into subject specific folders back in my dorm room and i always made sure to make page numbers on them

so i could put them back together easily when i was reviewing atthe end of the semester. and these folders, in turn, were stored in a black file box that i kept in my dorm room, but i highly recommend getting one of these if you don't have one. so that's in for this video. hopefully some of thesetips will help you become a more organized student

which in turn should help you cut down on stress when the demands of the semester start piling on. if you enjoyed this video or found it helpful, then leaving a like is much appreciated and i will see you next week. hey guys, thank you so much for watching this incredibly exciting video about file organization. yeah.

well, if you wanna get new videos every single week about being a more effective student, you can click that big red subscribe button right there. i also wrote a book on how to improve your grades and it's absolutely free, so if you wanna get a copy, click the picture of the book and i'll send you one. you can find notes anda summary of this video by going to the companion blog post

at the orange logo right there, and if you missed last week's video, we talked about marcus aurelius' thoughts on self-discipline. a lot of people liked that one so definitely check it out. lastly, if you got questions or just wanna connect with me, i'm @tomfrankly on twitter or you can leavea comment below. thanks for watching.

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