New Year PC Cleanup with the Fences 4 Pages Feature

While I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions for myself, it’s hard not to feel the pull of “new year, new me!” every time we finish our midnight celebrations. More often than not, this is accompanied by an urge to clean and purge certain areas of my home in an effort to feel like I’m starting fresh. This desire often extends to my personal computer as well, since I spend large amounts of time on it for my various hobbies and work endeavors.

I have said it before, but it’s worth repeating: I can’t live without Fences. Traditionally, I have kept most of my interests segmented on my desktop by creating custom fences for each hobby…but, as my hobbies have grown and expanded into other side-gigs, it meant that they were starting to outgrow being within a single fence.

That’s where the pages feature comes in! This is one of my favorite Fences features. After making sure to enable it in your settings (pictured below), you can drag a fence or a file to the edge of your display and it will flip over to a new “page” that you can customize with Fences and files to suit your needs.

In my case, I have 3 pages of Fences. My main display has my games, commonly used files, and so on, and my second monitor is filled with fences that organize all of my Stardock work needs. For my other two pages, I have sectioned off my work for my local Comic Con on one page, and then on the other I have all of the Dungeons & Dragons content that I do both in relation to the convention and for my own personal enjoyment.

Switching pages is easy and seamless! There are a few different preferences you can choose from on how you’d like to trigger the switch; I know that I sometimes will accidentally flip pages when I’m dragging a file close to the edge of my screen, so I like to click that option off and choose the option to switch pages by either right-clicking or by using my middle mouse button.

While my main page needs some organizing and cleaning up (this is the aftermath of me moving Fences off of it and onto their own new pages), I feel a lot better about the organizational flow of my machine now. I know where everything is and it’s quick and easy to access, without being cluttered. Often, the more I have to view at once means that it’s harder for me to find what I’m looking for.

Each of my secondary pages have a fence at the top that titles the page for me while also serving to house documents or folders that are more general to the topic and don't fit into the other specific fences. I like this method because, at least in my brain, when I have something that doesn't fit a defined category well and I'm not sure where to put it, it tends to get tossed somewhere and lost. At least this way, I can put it in my top title fence and know exactly where it is.

If anything, this exercise served to show me that I devote a lot of brain space to board games and Dungeons & Dragons/TTRPGs, lol. Do you use pages? How do you prefer to organize your PC?