I’ve just been trying to get my documents folder organised. I have a bad habit of just dumping things in there – little snippets of txt files, longer doc files, even the odd spreadsheet or presentation – at the topmost level and not giving them another thought. Which is fine and dandy, until the volume of stuff gets too high to easily find things.
So I start creating directories to put things in, and before long, there’s a hierarchical tree structure that makes some sort of sense, at least to me.
But there’s also a bunch of random crap also sitting there, in smug little directories of its own, jostling for position and serving as an unnecessary distraction. You know the kind of things I mean. The folder labelled “Custom Office Templates” that Windows puts there, despite the fact that the standard templates are stored with the Office apps that use them. The “Saved Games” folders that Steam and GOG and apparently every game designer thinks are better placed in the Documents folder than stored under their applications – which also tends to mean that they don’t get deleted if you uninstall the game, just to really rub it in.
Coders, programmers, console cowboys, keyboard jockeys, whatever the hell you’re calling yourselves this week, I would like to make a request of you. I want you, before you set a default saving location, to ask yourself one simple question:
Is the file I intend to have saved here actually any sort of Document?
Because if not, it doesn’t belong in the My Documents folder. It’s really not that hard.
And don’t weasel – you know what a document is in this context, and if you’re honest, you find this just as annoying as the rest of us. Although perhaps not quite as annoying as this guy or this other guy do.
Hell, at this point, it’s such a rare thing to do that you could probably advertise it as a selling point of whatever it is you’re selling. At very least, it’d be a feature, not the bug we currently have.