Digital Tool Tutorial: Google Drive

We all know "the cloud"... this endless theoretical space where our data lives and exists on the internet. Keeping our documents, photos, school projects, and music in one space is important! What's even more important is keeping it organized. Google drive is a space where we can keep, and organize our files and create new ones. Here are my tips and tricks for managing your google drive:

First - Sign in

First things first... You'll want to make sure you're keeping your files under one profile. Be mindful of which google account you are going to be using primarily and make sure you are logged into that account before beginning. When you open your browser, type in "drive.google.com" into the search bar. The website will prompt you to sign in. If already signed into an account, double check to see if it is the desired google drive account you want to use.

Second - Upload your documents 

In order to organize your files, you'll first need to upload all of your desired files directly onto your google drive. To do this, you can click on the "+New" button. This will expand the drop down menu. You can choose to create new files or upload files directly from your device. Select which files within your device you would like to upload. (To save you some time - search how to multi-select on your device) Depending on how many files you have selected, this will take some time to upload. 

Third - Create folders 

Now to get to the fun part (If you don't particularly like cleaning up messes, you read that sarcastically). My tip to organizing a clear and effective google drive is creating folders! To create a folder, click the "+new" button in the top left corner, and clicking "New Folder". This will create a new folder entitled "Untitled". For this first sweep of files, you'll want to create very broad categories for yourself, and then you can fine tune them as you go deeper into the drive. For example, my drive has 3 initial folders "School", "Work", and "Personal". Of course, everyone has their own needs and style, so maybe play around with how many and what kinds of categories you need. For instance, if you prefer having files organized by file type, you may have folders labeled "Photo", "Video", " Documents", etc. 

Fourth - Get Moving 

Now you'll have to move all of your files into these folders. So go through each file and figure out what goes where. Again, going off of my example, I have moved my family photos into "personal", my company's spreadsheet into "work", and my essay on developmental psychology into "school". 

Fifth- Get Specific

Now lets do it over again! In each folder, you'll be creating even more folders! But remember, you'll want to be specific enough that when you come back to this, you'll find what you're looking for. For example, in my "personal" folder I have the following folders: "Photos/Videos", "Poems", and "Personal Finances". 

Sixth - Don't get crazy 

Now before you go all folder-crazy, please remember that in order for this drive to be as effeciemt as possinle ,think about how few clicks you have to make to get to the specific file you may be looking for. So if you find yourself with 20 folders and 1-2 files in each folder... that likely means you're making it way too specific. Try backing out of the folders and leaving it to where you had at least 4-5 different files in each folder.

Take a look at what you've done! Voila! Thats one of the things i love most about the google drive. It's easy to navigate. Let me know how you have organizes your google drive!