Growth Hacker

Hazel (http://www.noodlesoft.com) is a Mac automation app that, among many other things, can be used to automatically move files into sub folders based on filenames. Some great tutorials already show how to do this using the “Created Date” of a file. Here are a few:

• ScreencastsOnline
• MacSparky

What if you’re doing an expense report? It’s likely that your expenses may be for the previous month so using the created date won’t help you as the created date will be the present date. Instead the answer is to use “Custom Tokens”.

The video below shows how to setup file sorting in Hazel based on custom tokens.

Here’s the naming convention I reviewed in the video:

Filenames:

2012-04 – work expense – dropbox.pdf
2012-05 – work expense – nmodal.pdf

Move Files into Sub Folders:

2012-04 – work expense – dropbox.pdf

Into:

Test Expenses –> 2012-04 – work expense

2012-05 – work expense – nmodal.pdf

Into:

Test Expenses –> 2012-05 – work expense