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• 1 2018-06-14T21:36:19-07:00 Project Planning - Organizing Your Stuff 10 Here are steps to help you start your project in a structured way plain 2018-06-15T17:08:16-07:00 To set you up for success, you need to make sure that you can find your items once you've collected or created them.  You do not want to spend your time searching through various folders on your Desktop to find your information.  As you document your work, you will want to save content that is your project as well as the managerial documentation related to it.

  File Naming

  You should set up a consistent file naming convention that makes sense to you and can scale as you add more content. 
  • Consider if you will be collaborating with other researchers and how you will need to share and edit your files. 
    • You may wish to include the date of creation as part of the file name for on-going documents to help with version control. 
  • For media files, consider how you plan to use or organize them in your project and create a convention that makes it easy to recognize the files in a list.  Remember that most files will be alphabetized so writing a descriptive file name may not help you organize the item.

  Directory - Structure and Location

  Decide where you will be saving your content and how it will be organized.  A clearly organized directory will help you find your items quickly and without frustration.
  
  You will want to have a main folder for your project then sub-folders for content found in the project and for content related to the information about the folder.  Your content should then be organized in a cascading way so plan out your hierarchy before you get started.  You may need to make some changes as you proceed but you want to avoid having one folder with all content dumped into it.

  All material related to similar content should be kept together, such as:
  budget, contracts, student help, exhibits, grants, MOUs, documentation, booklets, images, videos, notes to yourself, public lectures, press, planning, reports, promotional videos, planning, sound files, interviews, keyword lists.

  You will want to save your files somewhere safe and back up your files in various locations.  Consider using cloud storage if you have non-sensitive documents or an external hard drive.  You should keep your files together and not have them saved over several storage devices.  Thumb drives can get lost.