How to structure your documents and files in a smart way

I believe that good structure is good for your mind and body. If you have a clear structure it is easier to find what you are looking for and you save a lot of energy.

Calendar

• I have a google calender which I share with some of my family members
• On my cellphone I use the calender and it is synchronized with Outlook
• I have installed a calender app called "Jorte".

Email

• My cellphone is synchronized with Outlook.
• I use both Gmail and Outlook (old Hotmail). It's great to be able to access the email from various places. It was useful while travelling in Australia for example.
  
  I am sometimes thinking about the fact that I use a "Cloud service" for emails and I wonder, is this a good thing? Do I want a company I actually don't know much about to handle my important files? Since I am not completely sure I don't use a "Cloud service" to permanently store other files yet.
  
  Some of the benefits with a "Cloud service" is that you can access the data from many places.
  There might also be possibilities to get backup of your files.
  
  With a "Cloud service" you store your data "in the cloud" at a company's computer/server, instead of for example buying a program to handle files that you store on your own computer.
  
  While writing this post I searched for cloud services and got this result, this could be interesting to read:
  http://www.top-10-online-backups.com/best-cloud-storage
  

Bills

• Some of my bills are electronic and that's practical. 
• My other bills I keep in a pile until they are payed, then I keep them in a drawer,
  After some months I put them in a binder. To me it's great to store the bills easily in a drawer instead of putting them in a binder at once. 

Perfect size to fit a paper

Photos

Dropbox

• To share Photos temporarily I use Dropbox. 

Google Drive

• A friend of mine uses Google Drive, which I have not used, but it seems similar to Dropbox.
  

Locally on the computer

• Otherwise I keep my photos locally on my computer and we have one backup made in Linux and another manual backup which is done by copying folders.
• I store copies of my data files at another destination on an external drive. 
• To keep the manual copying easier I store my files in a structure sorted by year.

Tags

To easier find your photos you can add tags to your photos. These tags can be used to filter and find specific photos.
You can do this in Windows Explorer by selecting a file with the context menu, then  select properties and the "Information" tab. In this tab you can find Tags. The Tags are separated by semicolon ";".

You can also use tags on other kinds of files, like a Word document.

Photo program Lightroom

If you have access to the program Lightroom it is really easy to add tags to your photos. You can add tags in Lightroom and export these tags to the final photo files.