keep yourself organized

If you plan to create content on any kind of regular basis, one of the most helpful things you can do for yourself is to create a system to organize the raw materials that make up your content. Depending on what you’re creating, this might look like: a chronological storage of photos & videos; a database of articles, documents and personal notes; transcripts of past podcast/interview recordings, etc.

One of the most valuable things about long-term content creation is the ability to recall old information or material which can be interrelated and built upon in the future, and the best way to save yourself a lot of time and headache making those connections in the future is to get organized early.

As someone who created weekly video content for a single client three years in a row and was constantly needing to very quickly dredge up material referenced many months or years ago, trust me, you’ll thank yourself later.

principles for organization

Yesterday’s message was about the importance of organizing the raw materials for your content, so today I thought I’d spell out a handful of principles for going about that organization.

innoficiency

First of all, remember innoficiency, the idea that, in general, you cannot increase efficiency without decreasing innovation, and vice versa.

This is important because I’ve found that large projects do not often start out very organized, mostly because they don’t know what they are yet–that is, they are in a very innovative phase. However, as the form of the content starts to solidify, the priority shifts from figuring out what works, to maintaining what has been proven to work as efficiently as possible. This is the point at which you want to start optimizing your organization.

intake

The first phase of organizing is having dedicated channels for receiving material. Ideally, you want to consolidate these intake channels as much as possible. This is the difference between having a single mailbox where all mail goes in a neat stack, and letting the mail carrier throw each individual letter toward your house from the street and letting the envelops flutter down to the lawn where they will.

But the key is to look at these consolidated inboxes regularly and process information out so that they are almost always empty.¹

archiving

But where does this information go once it’s been processed out? This is where archiving comes in.

I broadly think of archiving in two categories: specific and general.

Specific archiving is for information that has a single dedicated purpose. These materials should be as closely related to that purpose as possible.

For example, in the creation of a video project, all videos, photos, audio, etc, for that specific project should be grouped together in a single project folder and organized accordingly.

General archiving applies to information that may have many future applications.

So if, for the aforementioned video project, I have captured video of a business or product that I know will be useful again for another project in the future, I may process and save those clips into a separate general archive folder to be pulled from next time they are needed.

In certain circumstances I am also a proponent of what might be called messy archiving. This means that if the information you’re archiving is searchable (e.g. emails, articles, or other items with robust text or metadata), then you can lump a lot of it together in broad categories and rely more on searching to quickly retrieve it rather than spending enormous amounts of time creating intricate sub-folder systems.

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I’m sure there’s more to say, but that’s the broadstrokes of my organization thought process.

Tomorrow I’ll give some specific suggestions of tools that I use in my daily workflows. If you have favorite organization tools or resources feel free to send them my way!

1. As some of you will undoubtedly have noticed, I am a big proponent of David Allen’s Getting Things Done as well as Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. ↩︎

tools for organization

To wrap up our discussion on organization, for the time being anyway, I wanted to share a handful of tools that I use to keep myself organized. This is not a specific endorsement for any of the particular tools mentioned, but each represents a principle that you can accomplish using a tool of your choice.

Obsidian is my notetaker. I use it to collect articles, copy quotes from books, capture meeting notes, and draft and archive this newsletter every day. I don’t use it for raw thought development or journaling because I prefer to use pen and paper in those instances, but if any of those raw thoughts become sticky, they usually end up in Obsidian. There is also a very useful Chrome extension for saving entire articles as notes which I use frequently.

Post Haste is a very simple folder structure template software. For every media project I begin, I start by creating a standard set of folders and project files which are stored as templates in Post Haste.

TickTick is my to-do list app of choice. Anything I need to do that has an action associated with it gets logged in TickTick. I like the ability to add robust notes and even files to tasks so everything related to that action can be referenced in one place until it is complete. The calendar integration is also quite helpful.

WinCatalog is a new addition to my arsenal, but it has already become fairly indispensable, although not everyone will need it. WinCatalog takes a “snapshot” of your harddrives so that you can easily reference what data is stored where even when the harddrive isn’t connected to your computer. This probably isn’t necessary if you don’t have nearly two dozen external harddrives lying around, but having some way to quickly search through files to find old data is still a good idea. (I have not researched a Mac equivalent for this, but I’m sure it’s out there.)

I also suggest looking into some sort of bookmark manager for web hyperlinks. A few years ago I cobbled together a solution that works great for me (also Windows exclusive), but the idea is to manually index the parts of the internet that you want to access or recall and detach them from algorithms, which are great at serving up new info, but not so great at specifically retrieving old info.

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Let me know if you have any favorite tools, or if you have come up with any processes to help in your content creation and organization! And if you have any questions about these particular tools I’d be happy to answer them.