Organizing Work

As with any filing system, it is important to store your file systematically so they can be retrieved easily when required. How you organize the files on your computer (or you Google Drive, etc.) can have drastic implications your ability to complete a project, rank, or merit badge. Let's take a look at a few scenarios: 

• You email your work but didn't get a response from your Merit Badge Counselor. 6-months later you ask about how much work you need to do to complete the badge. The counselor tells you you have one requirement left. What? You emailed it 6-months ago! You start looking for the email, but it's buried and you can't find it. You try to search for it in Google Drive, but you don't remember what you named it, or where you saved it. Having a standard folder structure means you could have found the document quickly and sent it again. As it turns out, you did email it, but because you forgot to copy a second adult, your counselor did not even look at it. 

• You submit work for a requirement. You spent a lot of time working on the format and getting the tables to follow an example. Your counselor approves it! now you have to something very similar again (looking at you Hiking MB #4 & #5), instead of having to do all the formatting work, you can make a copy of the file and replace the text in your tables!

• You do work for a rank requirement. A year later, a merit badge has a similar requirement (looking at you, Camping MB). Because you saved your work the first time around, you can use that as a starting point and reduce the amount of it takes to complete the duty ros... I mean, requirement. 

The format I recommend following is having a hierarchical structure, but don't get too crazy with the number of levels. One way this could look is: 

In your Google Drive home folder, you have multiple folders for the major things in your life. These could be: 

• School

• Scouts

• Video Games

and so on. In your Scouts folder, you may have: 

• Outdoor Trips

• Merit Badges

• Ranks

Another way to look at this: 

Anyway, you get the idea. If not, here's a video describing this in greater detail. It also includes some information on backing up your files!

Spoiler: I keep my files in folders. Not just that, I try to organize my folders so I can easily find things. Let's go back to how I organized my folder tree when I was a Scout. 

I had a folder specifically for my Scouting work. This may be a surprise, but I kept it in the "My Documents" folder back on Windows 98. The folder was called "Scout Work" and had everything I had to type up for a requirement. It was organized like so: 

.../My Documents/Scout Work/

• CoH

• Outdoor Trips

• Rank

• Merit Badge

and so on. 

Let's take a look at some of these folders in closer detail: 

In each folder, I had a lot of files. For each requirement I had a set of files that had the work I did for the requirement. I may have done some of the work for a requirement in multiple programs, such as Word, Excel, and an image processing software. Guess what, that's 3 files to start with! Let's see how this may have been implimented for... the Hiking Merit Badge: 

The example above was pre-Dropbox/Google Drive/Onedrive/iCloud. I would backup my files once a month by burning them to a CD. Yes, burn my files to a CD and I had stacks of CD's with backups of my files (you have to remember the cloud storage options we have today didn't really exist before 2005-2008). If my computer died, at most I would lose one moth worth of work, and hey, compared to my friends, I backed up often. Today we have so many cloud-based options available to us, and at low cost. Losing data should be a thing of the past!

I highly recommend doing your work in Google Drive! They offer the largest free storage plan, and the word processing document and spreadsheet workbook software is adequate for your Scouting needs. Google Drive uses a browser interface so you can work on virtually any computer (Windows, Mac, Linux), and it supports the folder structure talked about above. 

If you don't like Google Drive for whatever reason, there's also OneDrive (Microsoft) and iCloud (Mac). There are also a host of alternatives, but OneDrive/iCloud mesh pretty nicely with your host operating system.