Organising your work on a computer is crucial. Here is a simple, but effective, workflow that might also work for you. Think of a piece of work as a project with subfolders – eg
Project
- Attic
- Data
- Plot
- Program
- Protocol
- Result
- Paper
- Tmp
- Log
- Slides
You can of course add/remove folders and use names of your choosing.
For any project then, we can then store appropriate files in the relevant folders.
A neat thing with R is that you can write a script it to create your folders.
# make my project folders mydir <- "C:/A_New_Project" # NB the / has to forward not \ backward # Now create the subfolders d <- NULL # create a null or empty vector # Assign each folder to an element in the vector d[1] <- mydir d[2] <- paste(mydir,'Attic', sep='/') d[3] <- paste(mydir,'Data', sep='/') d[4] <- paste(mydir,'Plot', sep='/') d[5] <- paste(mydir,'Program', sep='/') d[6] <- paste(mydir,'Protocol',sep='/') d[7] <- paste(mydir,'Result', sep='/') d[8] <- paste(mydir,'Paper', sep='/') d[9] <- paste(mydir,'Tmp',sep='/') d[10] <- paste(mydir,'Log',sep='/') d[11] <- paste(mydir,'Slides',sep='/') # run a loop to create each folder and subfolder for(i in 1:length(d)) dir.create(d[i], showWarnings = FALSE) setwd(mydir) # set the working directory to the new project folder getwd() # check that its is the correct folder dir() # list subfolders