You’ve ‘confessed’, you’ve gone ‘cold turkey’. Now you want to stay ‘On The Wagon’.

 Whether you are an Internet Consumer or an Internet Producer, you need to get organised with a system for storage and retrieval of valuable information, such as emails and website adresses, and of data, which may be text, images, audio or video.

1)  EMAIL – Decide which senders are okay, and delete, block and unsubscribe the rest. Create 10 main folder categories to sort emails you wish to keep for reference. This gives you an easy overview of your email universe, and stops you from the ‘Overloaded Inbox’. Then each list of subcategories that you evolve in each category can be also limited at say 5-10, so that when you click on the little dropdown arrow by the category name, the ‘Folder Tree’ does not shoot down off the bottom of the page ) . Examples of emails which are important to store could be receipts for purchases and login details for product websites. If you have emails you want to peruse later then make a folder for them. The important thing is to keep your INBOX lean. Have a look at Paula Brett’s blog and see where you might fit as an ‘emailee’.

2)  PASSWORD MANAGER  - Get yourself a secure password manager. Make it a habit to add the username and password for each secure site you are member of. eg memberships and support desks. Make sure you do this straight away with a new membership, or you will forget the details and waste time finding them. I use Roboform, which lets you store about 10 free logins, before you need to upgrade to the pro version which has unlimited slots. It is also excellent for instant form filling and will save you heaps of time and allow you to generate passwords when needed. Google has a basic Autofill tool, but I don’t know how secure it is.

3)   FAVOURITE WEBSITES – The object is to limit the Favourites dropdown menu to 10 categories, to start with. Have you ever noticed categories that made sense 12 months ago, now seem irrelevant ? Your mind is expanding – change the labels on the filing cabinet. If you already have Favourite websites that dropdown into a maze of categories that no longer make sense, then start a new category called At The Top, or some other title staring with the letter A (eg Action Today, At Home Business so that it will be easy to find at the top of the menu. Create a list of 10 subcategories, and these will be for websites that you use a lot, making them quick and easy to locate. This is your new FRESH SLATE tree. Then you can go through the old categories and delete/reassign the saved urls into the new Tree, according to how relevant they still are. As long as you have the 10 rule going for each branch of your folder tree, then you can keep your menu display small and save time and distraction when locating the favourite.

4)   HARD DRIVE  - When it comes to retrieving stored data, it is important to have easy recall, and once again don’t have too many Major Categories. So you might have stored it under Documents>Subject eg Internet Marketing>Name of  Vendor>Name of Product with Date of Acquisition. Generally I look for stuff based on the Vendor eg John Thornhill or Ewen Chia etc, but if you want to cross reference based on say Listbuilding, then rather than filling your hard drive with duplication, you can just have a subfolder with a brief note on which vendor product is the source. Remember when you unzip a compressed or ‘zipped’ file to access the contents, you are duplicating content and eating up disc space, so delete the zip file to keep your folders uncluttered, and preserve disc storage.

All Righty Then - now we are ready to go out and meet some people on the Internet, but stay sober.  Look in again soon, in fact why not subscribe to my blog and get notified of my next update, when I’ll give some tips on dealing with fast-talking pickup artists and other sales people who might try to ‘spike your drink’  :o)

Ciao JJ