Google Drive Organization

I spent some time organizing my personal Google Drive last night.  I had some time, and I was avoiding putting laundry away (my least favorite chore).  However, as much as I don't fret over clean laundry laying all over, I cannot stand my files not being organized.

Last week the school took our laptops back to re-image them for the new system at our school.  That means that the day before I was dumping my laptop files into Google Drive without much rhyme or reason.

The first thing I did was go folder by folder and eliminate duplicates.  This is when I noticed that my drive is 31% full.  It says that in the bottom left corner.  That seems like a lot for me, but I have both my husband's and my most recent phone picture drops on there since they were on the laptop.  

I took a few minutes to transfer the pictures to our external drive.  They are also uploaded to one of the three photo sites we use, but I can't remember which one because I use Snapfish, Shutterfly, and Walgreens depending on who has the best sale at the moment (not a great organizational plan, but a cost-effective one).  This will be a slight issue when I go to create yearbooks for our family.

Back to Google Drive.  I have a separate folder for each of my family members, and one called Other People's Stuff for everyone else like when my brothers send me papers to read because I never know when they might come in handy.

I love the sort by most recent features in Google Drive.  It really makes finding things easier for me.  I know you can search, but I usually forget the actual name of the document and typing out is so time-consuming.

I then created folders by major areas of my life: College/Grad Work, Finances, School (because some things ended up in my personal drive, but I shared this one with my school account), Menu Planning, Girl Scouts, etc.

Next came the time-consuming part: going through each item in my drive and either trashing it or putting it in a folder.  This takes time, but you can mass move items by using the checkbox.  I went through and checked all the school stuff before dragging it to the school folder.

Honestly, I am still working on this because I only give myself an hour at a time to organize it.  I have yet to tackle my school Google Drive, but that is a MUCH MUCH bigger job.