the content mint newsletter

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.