Are you one of the many people who feel like January is a time for cleaning out the old and making room for the new? Whether it’s the closets, bookcases or the garage, it seems our living spaces are begging to be reorganized and de-junked. Your computer is no different. Through your daily tasks with work and family, your computer can become over stuffed with unnecessary items, or cluttered with a lack of disorganization. Either way, it can hinder productivity and weigh you down!

Take a day or two to sort through your digital files. Organize things by category and also by date. Move anything that is old and unused but still valuable onto an external hard drive. Delete the unnecessary files and temp files. Create separate files for your family members to keep their data in so that it stays organized and functional.

Your picture files will always be better organized when you save them by the year, then the month and then the event.

It’s smart to create all of your monthly folders for 2015 right now, so that when you go to download, the space is there and waiting.

To set it up, create folders for each year, then inside the folder labeled by the year, create a folder for each month, and in there have different folders for every photo shoot or event, so you can easily find where that specific picture you need is. We remember events in our lives by time, so it is easiest to use dates (month and year) to organize your photos, whereas if you titled each folder by the name of the occasion there is a thousand ways to write it, and the odds aren’t very good that you’ll remember the exact title.

When you have all of your files organized, enjoy the peace of mind that comes with being prepared for a new 2015!