by Cody Hodge

Created on: October 21, 2009

One of the hardest things to do when you are a writer is to keep everything organized. There is so much that you have to keep track of, and there are so many places where your work could come from, or be kept at. Keeping that in mind, there are some ways that we can reduce our cyber clutter, and keep everything organized. Being organized keeps us focused, and keeps us from losing our minds, and our work.

The first thing that you have to do is keep everything in one place where you can easily find it. Whether you like to keep your files saved on your hard drive, or if you want to keep your files saved on-line, or the e-mail account that you use the most. This will keep everything in one spot, and allow you to always have access to it. I would suggest saving your work either to your e-mail account, or to one of the file saving areas of the Internet.

The next thing you need to do is to have relevant file names for your work. So many people simply save a work and then don't bother to give it a good name. Even if you just save it as the first few words of the document, you will always know what the document is that you are looking for. If you have 54 files named untitled document, it can get annoying trying to search through everything that you wrote to search for one file.

Keep your folders organized too. If you are going to be writing a Helium article, and an article for another site, you should keep that separate. You don't want to send in one article to Helium that was supposed to go to another site for an upfront payment, or an exclusive license. It might not be a total disaster, but one wrong cut and paste can cost you a few dollars. You might argue that you could stop it before you do it, but I know myself, and others have accidentally submitted an article to the wrong title.

Always make sure that you have just one area of your computer for your writing. If you are going to have you work saved on your hard drive, you might want to have just one user account on your computer for your work. That way you can put a password on it, and no one can see it, or edit it by accident. This will save you another headache, and always make sure you make restore disks just in case your hard drive goes crazy.

Keeping your work organized can seem like a hassle at times, but it is something that is good to do if you are serious about your work. Having your files already available to you is something you need to do just in case someone wants to buy something you posted, or was interested in seeing more work. It can be the difference between your big break, and still scouring the Internet for new writing opportunities.

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