Stay Organized by Color Coding Your Desktop and Following Your Workflow

Creating a desktop zen, will help you be more efficient so you can focus on your projects rather than feel overwhelmed by desktop clutter.

Customizing your folders and desktop icons can help you to quickly and easily locate your favourite applications, the projects you are working on, your most important files and folders.

This example with an icon of a vintage filing cabinet is from the series of Productive Icons, the Workflow Collection would make a great choice for a folder with archived projects.

Rapidly finding and identifying the files you are looking for speeds up your work and reduces stress.

Color Code Your Folders For a Productive Desktop

Perhaps the easiest and most consistent yet flexible way to make your desktop more productive with icons is to use folder icons in different colors to color code your projects.

One way to colour code your tasks and files with folder icons is by assigning a color to a type of project, for instance by using blue folder icons for work projects and violet blue folders for personal projects.

Another method to colour code projects is to use colors to indicate workflow or actions. For example using one color for urgent actions, one for projects on hold, one for stuff that needs to be sorted out, one for downloads, one for inspiration or brainstorming, one for research and yet another for completed and filed projects.

Ready Steady Go Folder Icons are designed to help you colour code your projects. Think of them as a stimulus package for your desktop, and go get them today!

With a total of twelve shades of red, yellow and green you can use Ready Steady Go to indicate how urgent a project is. Red for urgent, yellow for medium or projects on hold and green for finished projects

To make it even more options when you color code your projects using icons there are four more sets of Luminous Folder Icons:, purple, blue, pink and orange.

Support Your Workflow With Icons

For even more of a process inspired approach, you could use the Workflow Collection, designed to support your workflow with a minimum of effort.

An Inbox icon for your “collection buckets” such as your folder for downloads, a folder for brainstorming, urls, images and lose ideas that need to be processed. The to-do icon (a clipboard) for “next actions”, the doing icon (a gear) for “active projects”, the pending icon (an hourglass) for “waiting for” and the archive icon for “completed projects”.

This method works excellently for David Allen’s Getting Things Done (or GTD) action management method but also for personal methods of staying productive and organized in a simple way.

Getting Organized On a Beautiful Desktop

Not only does customizing your icons to simplify work and leisure on your computer give you a review of your projects it also increases your productivity and helps you focus. As an extra bonus, using icons of your choice and taste as opposed to generic icons can make your life on your computer more gratifying, fun and beautiful. You are also more likely to keep your desktop uncluttered and tidy when you take the time to customise your desktop icons.

Illustrations with icons from the Workflow Collection. Folder icons from Luminous Blue Folder Icons. Olive green folder icon, amber yellow folder icon and garnet red folder icon form Luminous Ready Steady Go Folder Icons.