Applying the Japanese 5S Management System to IT: organising the files on your computer
Based on five Japanese words beginning with ‘S’, the 5S Philosophy focuses on effective work place organisation and standardised work procedures. It’s part of the Toyota Production System and of Kaizen – a Japanese management philosophy of continuous improvement. Today we’ll look at how 5S can help us organise the files on our computer focusing on the first S - Seiri (整理) or Sorting.
Seiri (整理) Sorting: Keeping only essential items. Everything else is stored or discarded.
Red Tagging
Chances are your current file system is a complete mess, so we’ll start with a radical step inspired by the 5S practice of red tagging (a process whereby a red tag is placed on all items not required to complete your job).
Red tagged items are moved to a holding area for evaluation. Occasionally used items are then moved to organised storage outside of the work area while unneeded items are discarded. Get an EMPTY external hard drive. If you don’t have one – buy one. These are two good models from Amazon: Freecom 500GB External Hard Drive and Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 1TB. Now move ALL of your files to your external hard drive. Delete all the files on your computer. But be careful not to delete your Documents, Pictures and Videos folders. Just leave them empty. In effect we’ve just ‘red tagged‘ all your files.
What are you working on?
Copy the folders corresponding to the projects you are currently working on back to your computer.
Be careful if you have a folder named clientA, containing sub-folders project1, project2, and project3 and you are currently working on project3. You’ll want to archive folder ClientA and sub-folders project1 and project2 (see step 3 below) and only move back the project3 subfolder back to your computer.
What else do you need to do your work?
In addition to project folders, I have a folder for accounting sub-divided into months and a folder of reference material containing pdf books about programming sub-divided into folders by programming language: php, python, ruby. I also have a library directory containing frequently used snippets of code and folders for photoshop brushes and patterns. Think about what you need and only keep what you really use.
Personal files and Music
I’ll write about how to organise your personal files such as your photos, and music in a future post. In the meantime copy them to a USB stick /drive. You wouldn’t leave your family’s old photo albums and your cd collection strewed round your office. Just can’t leave without music? Take this as an opportunity to discover new tunes and stream music from sites such as last.fm or the bbc iplayer, while we organise your music collection.
Archive Old Projects
Archive all the files and folders relating to old projects. Beforehand, do a quick sweep to make things more coherent. For example move folders with names like projectA_images to the projectA folder and gather up files that are not in their project folders. Apply the 80/20 principle here. These are your old projects and you don’t even know if you’ll ever look at them again. Use a compression tool such as winzip if appropriate and burn everything to DVD. Once the DVDs are burnt, make sure they are clearly labelled and move them to a storage cupboard. Delete the original files and folders on the hard drive as you go along.
Bin the Rest
If you are a Zen master – delete all the remaining files on the hard drive. If not, burn them to a DVD and label it with your name, the date and the title “Red Tagged”. Now put this DVD in your long term storage – and smile knowing you’ll never use it.
Shitsuke
Get your calendar and book a morning in three to six months time to repeat this exercise. Remember the 5th S - Shitsuke (躾) meaning ’sustaining the discipline’.
Liked this article? Check out how 5S can help you maintain a clean computer desktop.
