In the early days of personal computing, desktop search was sketchy and it was critical to file documents in the proper folder so you could easily locate them again. Here’s a tip related to those early days when file names could only have 11 characters.

2Delete is a file folder name I created for files I had to save on my computer for a short time, but don’t want to keep. It is something that I use regularly for situations like test printing of files to PDF, saving an “extra” backup copy of a huge legal document before doing major formatting changes that could wreck the document or having to download large sounds or video files I don’t want to keep, but want to play.

2Delete is shorthand for “if there’s a file here, it is OK to delete it.” That folder name may or may not make sense for your work. But you may have other needs that can be met by a few special folders you use. I did this thinking I would save hard drive space by not storing unneeded files. But it turned out an equal benefit was time saved not having to think about “Where should I save that?”