At the beginning of this year, I was creating so many different types of work that switching gears/finding my place (where was I again?) got to be a frustrating exercise. It was clear I was going to have to purge a lot of extraneous files (all those final, final, final proofs, etc.), stop treating my desktop like a sketchbook and find a better way to stay organized. After I spent hours purging files and reorganizing folders I created a desktop wallpaper planner that I could use to wrangle all my files and folders.

Instantly better workflow!

There are six areas of my desktop now: In Progress, Admin, To Do (with an inset box for Priority), Personal, Learn + Grow, and, last but not least, the almost always empty Completed area.

Using this system for file organization has been so helpful for me I’m sharing the files with you. I’ve set up 3 desktop wallpaper planners in different colorways. I hope you find them useful or that they inspire you to create your own wallpaper planner and get organized. In my system preferences, I set this desktop wallpaper to “Stretch to Fill Screen” but you could also set it to “Fit to Screen” if you want a little white space on the left and right of your planner.

DOWNLOAD THE DESKTOP WALLPAPER PLANNERS

And, if you’re not already doing this, make sure you’re backing up your machine daily (time machine/external hard drive, cloud service, or you could even back up important files to Google Drive). The computer I’m currently using is on its second hard drive. Having my work backed up saved me so much grief.