when inevitably, they'll lose 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 the exception 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 brag truthfrully about this,

I never once arrived to 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 system for 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 is accessible 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 computer lab in the building,

access the file right on the browser

and print it out.

Now in doing some research 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 opposed to 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 use Gmail 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 choose will 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 regular assignments just sitting there,

but projects get their own special folders as well.

This well designed tree structure 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 correct folder 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 about Dropbox 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've screwed 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 my Classes notebook stack.

I used to have two of these:

one for current classes and 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 has other 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 of paper 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 at the 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 these tips 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 and a 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 leave a comment below.

Thanks for watching.