On a train now peeking at someone’s laptop. His desktop is completely covered in document icons. And I mean completely, as in there’s no room for any more.

I’ve never seen this before. It’s both amazing and shocking at the same time.

@lmika you clearly have never looked over the shoulder of my partner while she is on the computer … add to that as far as I can see she never uses finder … and the ‘documents’ folder is where you put stuff to forget it.

@lmika My supervisor at university organised his Mac desktop by piling documents in little piles in various places. When he needed to find a particular document, he’d go to the pile and rummage through it for what he was looking for.

@JohnPhilpin @Miraz Yeah, I’m by no means tidy with my files. The Downloads folder is huge and things are spread out everywhere in my Documents folder. I try to keep the desktop free of clutter though, as I get overwelmed by a large number of files on there. But hey, maybe it works for him (or it’s not important enough for him to clean it up). 🤷

@yorrike Yeah, I tried the folio in the drawer approach for my physical files when I first moved out. After several months the whole system sort of broke down, and now my files are in a large drawer. I suppose I should clean them up some day.

@lmika I run a utility called clean that automatically moves desktop files off to a time stamped folder which is useful gor ‘recent docs I am working on’ before they get ‘properly’ filed

@JohnPhilpin @lmika I’ve been using Hazel for similar purposes. But I’ve always kept my desktop, download and documents folders tidy. Hazel just does it for me now.