Organizing Your Desktop

Ok, so this post has nothing to do with mathematics.  I had so much fun doing this I just had to share.  I’m not even sure how I came across this blog post by The Organized Classroom, but I really needed it.  The desktop of my computer looks a lot like how my brain feels most of the time; full and scattered…it drives my husband nuts!  After reading Charity’s post it gave me inspiration to try to organize my desktop.  So if you are looking for a fun thing to try over your Christmas Break, give this a try!!

Here is what my desktop normally looks like, well this was taken on a good day.  Normally the whole screen is covered with icons:

But after following the wonderful video tutorial by Charity over at The Organized Classroom, it now looks like this:

The basic idea is to create a blank slide in PowerPoint, or Keynote (in the video she did it using PowerPoint but I did the same thing just using Keynote).  Then insert shapes that you like.  You can keep the shapes with solid colors but I filled them with digital paper from DigiScrapDelights, DanaGarsonDesigns, AzmariDesigns, and kikaesteves, then added text boxes for the title in each shape.  You save the slide as an image (if using a Mac you need to import that image into iPhoto), then go in and change your background of your desktop to that image.  Final step is to move the folders and files around on your desktop so that they land in the appropriate shape.  As I did that, I also organized all the lonely files on my desktop so now they are housed in a folder (just hope I remember which folder, but hey, that is what the search box is for:).  I am hoping that having these shapes on my desktop will force me to keep organized in order to keep everything inside one of the shapes and keep it looking so nice.  So if you want to organize your desktop during your “down time” this Christmas Break and New Year’s, give this a try and don’t forget to watch the detailed video tutorial from The Organized Classroom.  Here are a couple more designs I tried out: