Computers, in their infancy, were sometimes referred to as “thinking machines”. This is somewhat of a misnomer. Computers don’t really “think” – they pretty much do as they’re told, either by a software designer, or by an end user like you or I. As personal computers become more powerful and capable, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that we humans are still in control. I’m not talking “Colossus: The Forbin Project”, apocalyptic stuff here. I’m talking about keeping track of your stuff in an age when computer operating systems try to do everything for you. There’s still hope, if you’re willing to think like a computer, then get your computer to think like you. Confused already? Hang with me.

Let’s say you’re writing a letter on your computer, using good ol’ Microsoft Word. Being a smart computer user (and realizing that Word could up and crash on you at any moment), you save your letter. You select “Save” from the menu, and a box appears, prompting you to decide on a name for your letter. You type in “letter_to_jim” and click the “Save” button. Oops. Where did you save it to? Thinking for you, your computer saved your letter to Word’s default location – usually the “My Documents” or “Documents” folder. Next time you go looking for your letter, you look in your “My Documents” folder, and there it is. Congratulations! You’re thinking like a computer.

But, are your letters really “Documents”, in human-speak? No, documents are the Magna Carta and your Last Will and Testament. Here’s a novel thought. Why not put your letters in a Letters folder? Think back to when you saved your letter. The Save box probably had a way to “Create a New Folder” somewhere on your computer, name it “Letters”, and save the letter into the new folder. It could even be a “Letters” folder inside your “My Documents” folder. Congratulations again! You just got your computer to think like you!

This may seem like pretty elementary stuff, but I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone with people who claimed they saved something, but had no idea of where it went.

Remember that, either on a Mac or in Windows, folders are called folders, and the icons actually look like folders, because the user interface was designed to reflect what we humans have been doing since we crawled out of caves and started organizing things – we put stuff in folders!

In computer-speak, it’s called a “hierarchical file system”. For example, a main folder, “Letters”, containing subfolders like “Bill” and “Mom”, all being subsets of and pertaining to the title of the main folder. Be careful, though. You can get carried away with this and end up with “embedded folder syndrome”, where you have too many folders within folders within folders within folders. You get the idea.

In the real world, we all know that special someone that never puts anything away in the filing cabinet or drawer. Things just sit on their desk gathering dust or pencil shavings or whatever. Those folks are alive and well in the computer world as well. You can’t even see their Desktop Picture behind the mosaic of documents and folder icons strewn across their Desktop, because that’s the only place they ever learned to save things to. If you’re one of these people (and you know who you are!), clean up that mess!

The bottom line? Even though you never told your computer where to put stuff, the software engineers who created it did. And, have you ever met a tidy computer geek? Point made.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski