This article originally appeared on the Affinity Consulting January 2013 newsletter on legal technology.

Your Mind and Body Shouldn’t be the Only Focus of Improvement in 2013

The December 13th edition of the Journal of Clinical Psychology contains statistics on the types of New Year’s resolutions that Americans make. The research indicates that 45% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions. Apart from the resolutions being spectacularly vague, which may account for the 8% success rate, there are some interesting bits of information.

You can probably guess three or four of them. Number 1 is losing weight – no surprise. Number 3 is being financially responsible. Quitting smoking ranks number 7, and spending more time with family closes out the list at number 10. I can’t help you with any of those. Where I can help, and the focus of this article, is number 2, “getting organized”.

Getting organized on your Mac doesn’t involve an expensive trip to the Container Store. Most of the tips I’ll provide cost little to nothing. They’re all designed to help you work more efficiently at creating, storing, and retrieving your data.

Install Updates

We Mac users can, so far, afford to be more lax in our updating than our Windows-using colleagues. Arguably, this instills bad habits, but we haven’t had the experience, beyond Office for Mac, of starting our computer on the second Tuesday of the month, Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday”, and being prompted to download and install X number of critical or important patches for flaws that Microsoft has fixed that month. This chore is usually followed by a required reboot to activate the patches.

Even though Macs don’t have a monthly patch cycle, our operating system and programs do get updated with bug fixes and new features. Installing these updates ensures that you have the most compatible, least buggy version available.

How do you get these updates? If you’re running Mac OS 10.7 or 10.8 (Lion or Mountain Lion), either on your Dock or in the Applications folder, there should be an icon called “App Store”. Click this icon and then the “Updates” button at the top right of the window that opens. Any updates Apple has released for the Mac OS operating system will be here. At the same time, you will be prompted to install any available updates you have purchased through the Mac App Store. Do this as well.

If you’re running a version of Mac OS X earlier than 10.7, click on the Apple menu icon in the top left corner of your screen, then select “Software Update”. This accomplishes the same Apple software updating as described above. The only difference is that “Software Update” does not update any non-Apple programs.

In addition to the Mac OS and Mac Store Apps, you likely have software you downloaded directly from the Internet or installed via a DVD disk. These applications probably have an Internet-based updating system. For the Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat programs, click on the “Help” menu and then “Check for Updates”. For most other Mac applications, click on the menu item named for the application (i.e. “Byword”) and “Check for Updates”.

Those directions should take care of updating most applications. The only thing to be wary of, and this applies only to those applications not purchased from the Mac App Store, is to be sure to read the update prompt. If the offered upgrade is to a major new version (i.e. from 3.x.x to 4.0), and you install this non-free update, you may be left with a trial copy of the new version until you pay the upgrade fee. This type of upgrade is usually well labeled if you read the upgrade message.

Clean Your Dock

It seems that every application you install thinks itself so important that it deserves a space on your Dock. It’s wrong. Microsoft and Adobe are among the worst offenders. Install Office or Creative Suite, and suddenly you’re looking at eight or more new icons on the Dock; things like “Microsoft Messenger” or “Microsoft Document Connection”. I doubt you’ll use these things. Get rid of them. Just click and hold on the Dock icon you want to remove. While holding, drag the icon upwards onto the desktop until a puff of smoke appears below the mouse point. Release. The icon is gone from your Dock.

The dock is a great place for frequently-accessed applications. You don’t want it so small that you can’t distinguish the icons or have to turn on Dock magnification (Apple menu -> Dock -> Turn Magnification On). If you want to keep the quick access to applications, but also unclutter the dock, then open a Finder window and drag your Applications folder from the sidebar down onto the right side of the Dock. Clicking that folder gives you a list of your programs to launch: a single icon on the Dock that accesses all your programs. You have the best of both worlds – a cleaner Dock and easy program availability.

Delete The Apps and Files You Don’t Use

Even though we are now accustomed to infinite storage space in the cloud – either through Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, or a similar service, our local computer can still fill up. The advent of cloud storage is excellent given that many Macs ship with flash hard drives, which makes local, on-computer storage fairly pricey. If your Mac is limited to 64-256GB, then space is precious, especially if you maintain a large iTunes library.

If you’ve downloaded trial applications or installed applications from a disk, and you no longer use them, then delete the applications by dragging them to the trash. If the application you delete came from the Mac App Store, you’ll be prompted for your computer’s password. Then just empty the trash.

In the same spirit, check your Downloads and Documents folders for cruft you no longer need. I have seen Macs with an overwhelming number of files in the Downloads folder simply because the user never bothered to delete, for example, the PDF he downloaded and read once. Deleting the things you no longer need makes it far easier to find the things you do need when you need them.

Name Things So You Can Find Them

Working in a legal environment, you’re exposed to mounds of paper. There isn’t enough space in this column to preach the virtues of a paperless workflow and a good desktop scanner. Today, let’s just focus on the documents you create on the computer. The minimum, and free, basis of an effective electronic filing system is a folder for each client, preferably sub-divided by each matter, with each document name beginning with the year-month-day, so the files organize chronologically right in the Finder (i.e. 2013-01-13 – Motion for Summary Judgment). That way, a quick look at the Finder folder gives you a timeline of the matter.

There are many applications that can help automate this: TextExpander, Hazel, or Default Folder X to name a few. The Mac even has document management-type applications, from the inexpensive Yep to a full-fledged document system like DocMoto. But all of these program cost money. Starting with the Finder is a good way to get in the habit of organizing your files, and discovering what part of the process slows or annoys you before diving in with several new programs at once.

Enable Time Machine

This is quick and to the point. Now that you’ve cleaned your machine, updated it, and organized your files, make sure you enable Time Machine to continually backup your newly-pristine Mac. When you first enable Time Machine’s backup functionality, you’re given a choice of where to store the backup. It can’t be on the same computer you’re backing up. If you have an extra USB or Firewire external hard drive lying around, you can plug it into the Mac and Time Machine will use it. If you don’t have an extra hard drive, then this is the first tip that will cost you money. You can easily, and fairly inexpensively, buy an external USB drive from Amazon or BestBuy. Plug it into your computer and follow the setup instructions.

A second, and more expensive, Apple-approved way to backup with Time Machine is to buy a Time Capsule for either $300 for 2 terabytes or $500 for 3 terabytes. Time Capsule is a pricier route, and you need the ability to connect the device to your wireless network. But, once connected, the Time Machine program is backing up every hour so long as you’re connected to the same wireless network as the Time Capsule device, rather than only when you are physically connected to the external hard drive.

Hopefully these five tips will help you start the new year right and, if your New Year’s resolution was “getting organized”, keep you on the right path all year long. Plus they’re cheap or free, to soothe that post-Christmas-shopping spending hangover.

January 3, 2013