the content mint newsletter

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. ↩︎