We’re heading towards a paperless way of life. With more and more gadgets released each year, we are steering our lives online and reducing the need to use and store hardcopy documents.
But is your electronic life sorted?
Are you receiving your bills via email? What about bank statements? More importantly, do you have a system in place to revisit these files if need be?
Here are our tips for making your electronic life as organised as your home.
Organise your email account
Do you find yourself being inundated with emails? Welcome to the age of online marketing and subscription lists. Email is a very effective way to receive bills etc. but if you’re not careful your Inbox can soon be a disaster.
De-clutter your Inbox by creating different folders for each category of email. For example: bills; personal; work; school.
As you receive emails file them into their corresponding category and delete any unwanted messages. Do this daily to stay on top of your Inbox.
You can also use the find or search function within your folders to find specific emails at a later date!
Keep your computer files sorted
It’s very tempting just to save files and documents all over your computer desktop under the guise of sorting them later. We all know that ‘later’ will never come. Instead divide the documents folder on your computer into further folders.
Consider creating folders for the following: resumes; individual family members; finances; contacts; menus; photos; music etc.
This is just the beginning. If you need many more folders (even folders within folders) go right ahead! Keeping your electronic life sorted into different folders will make searching for a particular document that much easier!
Back-up your files regularly
We’ve all heard it happen to someone. Computer dies. Years of hard work suddenly lost. We want to avoid this scenario.
You have a number of options when backing up computer files. It’s a good idea to find out the storage capacity of your computer and how many gigabytes of storage you’re currently using weighing up your options.
An external hard-drive is a popular choice. You can get hard-drives that are plugged into your computer via the USB port, or wirelessly which you can manually back up files to. Additionally, there are hard-drives that allow you to mirror your current computer to ensure you always have an up-to-date copy.
No matter the choice, you just have to back up your electronic life!
