I don’t know about you, but I’m always downloading stuff and saving stuff to my Desktop. The net result is that by the end of the day/week/month, my Desktop is always littered with files. This is a problem for obvious reasons — especially when I need to do a presentation or a demonstration of something with my laptop. It doesn’t look terribly professional to plug into a projector, and greet my audience with a bunch of random crap on my desktop.

The solution for me has been an amazing little application called Hazel. From their website: “Hazel is your personal housekeeper. Set up rules for any folder that could use some organizing and cleaning. Hazel does its work automatically and quietly in the background letting you focus on the your real tasks.”

In my case, I wanted to have Hazel help me organize my Desktop folder, as I already mentioned. It regularly checks that folder and moves files from my desktop to other folders to keep things neat and tidy. In my case, when Hazel checks my Desktop, if it finds any files that have been on my Desktop for more than a day, it automatically moves them into a folder titled “Yesterday”. Any files that are in my “Yesterday” folder for more than 1 day are automatically moved from there into a folder called “This Week”. Any files that end up in my “This Week” Folder for more than 7 days are moved into my “This Month” Folder, where they live indefinitely. (Yeah — I know — I need to rename that “This Month” Folder. There are quite a few things in there that are older than one month!)

The net result is that my desktop is kept neat and tidy for presenations, and my files end up in logical places that I can go through from time to time to organize into more meaningful stuff.

Sorry folks, but Hazel is a Mac only application and I’m not sure if there is something similar in the Windows world. As of this writing you can purchase Hazel for a mere $16 — a bargain.

–Pete