Object Oriented File Management

This post is about manual file management.

I came across How To Research Efficiently and I decided to share my approach for researching.  I am consultant and vast majority of my activities is generating tangible deliverables - presentations, documents, sample applications, troubleshooting labs, etc. Each activity requires preliminary research, input data, output data, versioning. What I come up with is a simple folders template that is always at hand:

TEMPLATE (rename it according to deliverable)

\Help materials (materials that I gather from online research)

\Draft v1

\Draft v2

…

\Draft vN

\Final (Version I deliver to the customer).

Help materials can be presentations, links, notes I took. These days my most significant source of research is blog sphere, Here is how I dig it - How to Use Outlook 2007 RSS To Effectively Aggregate And Distill Information. Draft vN is also delivered to the customer but only as sanity check to make sure our mutual expectations are set and met - kinda agile approach.

When I start new engagement toward new deliverable - I just create (copy/paste) new instance of the template folder [class?] and fill with proper content. That is why I think it reminds me object oriented approach.

It is simple habit that helps me being a bit more organized and also easy to back up - Back Up, Back Up, Back Up

Enjoy