You’ve probably heard the phrase, ‘tidy desk, tidy mind’. Nobody seems to know quite where it came from (we’ve searched), but the philosophy is easy to understand: if you’re not working amid piles of clutter, you can probably think more clearly and – as a result – be more productive.
This is just as true in the digital realm as it is in the physical world. The trouble is, Windows’ desktop is too convenient a place to save files you’re going to need in the near future. Why bury them several folders deep?
Well, for one thing, because your desktop can quickly get cluttered, which makes finding those files tricky. Secondly, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to give us more efficient alternatives to using the desktop as a dumping ground. Windows 10 and 11 have excellent built-in search tools, which go beyond indexing files on the basis of name alone and can pull up a list of results from within the contents of a file.