It has been posted a lot of times ... you're able to drag a folder to the dock, beside the trash, maybe your home directory, it will give you "quick" access to your files there, just click and hold it, it pops up the files there, ctrl+click or right click if you're on a 2 button mouse will do the same, a very old and forgotten feature is the favorites folder is under ~/library/favorites , you can drag it to the sidebar in the finder (You still get the heart ), if you want to include something there just drag it or select it and comman+alt+t will do the work, you may want to drag the favorites to the dock, do it from its position not from the sidebar it only will take it off from the sidebar, but if you want to add an alias to other folder, command+alt while dragging it will do it ... there are a lot of ways to access your files...