My GTD Post – Files and Documents Folder Structure

For those of you who don't know, GTD stands for Getting Things Done. I am slowly making improvements in my organization skills in my professional life. Recently I decided to take a closer consideration of my files and documents organization on my Vista laptop. I didn't really have a method to my madness as far as file organization went - some were in folders on my desktop, others were in a folder of the root of C, and yet others were in the profile structure provided by Vista. Two problems with this:

1. When I want to backup my important files I have no easy way of doing so.
   


2. The profile file storage provided by Vista gets cluttered with miscellaneous folders such as My Received Files, My Virtual Machines, Visual Studio 2005, etc., etc. It is often the default storage folder for several different programs.
   



So my requirements were as follows:






1. Contain all folders under one parent folder for easy backup


2. A hierarchy that could:
   - separate current and past projects
   - have a tree for media/docs


And this is what I came up with:







I've been using this for about 3 months now and it is working well thus far. For easy access I use shortcuts on my desktop. Additionally these shortcuts allow me to drop files directly into them as if they are folders living on the desktop.