Organization Skills 101

I've wanted to write this down for a long time. Here's how I use my laptop.

• All folder names are lower cased.
  This helps when traversing folders using your terminal - it's unnecessary having to press Shift every time you want to go to ~/Documents, for example. (Except it doesn't matter anymore, now that I use ZSH as my default terminal). Plus, to me, lowercase on the terminal is aesthetically pleasing, for reasons unknown.
• All my written code resides in one folder - the ~/code folder.
  The code folder is then divided into multiple directories - all named on programming languages, which contain workspaces/project names within (remember, they're all lower case). Larger projects that grow over time, or span over different languages, or become my primary projects are sent into ~/code/primary.
• Oh my zsh. It's awesome.
  The thing about using IntelliJ all the time is, you expect autocomplete everywhere you type/code. ZSH has an amazing context based tab autocompletion + an autocorrect. Plus it's super pretty. Oh and every time you're in a git inited folder, the promt will tell you which branch you're on. Super useful.
• The Desktop is clean - it literally has no icons - a picture of snow capped mountains is all that's there.
• Multiple Workspaces
  4 workspaces. When its been weeks since you last shut down your laptop, you're going to have a lot of windows open. One is permanently reserved for Android development. The second for all other sorts of dev/scripting. The third as an archive for things on the net I'd like to read, but don't have the time for right now. And the 4th for all the other things in the world. That workspace is literally named All The Useless Things Here.
• gtk-redshift. Protect your eyes!
  redshift -l 23:72 -t 5700:3600 -g 0.8 -m randr -v
  I've added this to the list of startup commands. During the night, the blue component of your laptop screen is dimmed/reduced - making the screen look reddish in color when viewed from an angle. It doesn't look red when you look straight into it. Sidenote: a lot of people are going to come up to you asking why your screen is red.
• Auto-empty the Downloads folder!
  A simple Python script that runs on startup notifies me to clean my Downloads folder every 7 days. There was a time when everything I owned belonged to that directory. Times have changed now, and my laptop is highly organized.
• Fresh Installs
  All self compiled software goes to /usr/local. All pre-packaged, external binaries and applications go to /opt. Yes, that's the ways things should be anyway.
  Note to self : its important not to keep binaries in the ~/Downloads folder!
• The Great Suspender
  Not a linux-y thing, but I highly recommend using the Chrome Extension The Great Suspender. It autohibernates tabs that have been opened but not used in the last x minutes - really useful for someone like me whose laptop slows down because of 3,262 tabs open across 428 windows. And yes, I use Chrome, not Firefox. I know, I know process vs threads yada yada. I liked Chrome. Period.