Organization

Links and Resources for the Chronically Disorganized

Merlin Mann — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:30:15 -0400

I’m still in a de-cluttering mode these days (more on that soon), so I was intrigued by this resource, which arrived this morning via Mrs. Folders.

While primarily a trade group for “professional organizers,” the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization site has some handy documents and links to help with identifying and solving pathological problems with clutter and hoarding.

If you can tolerate the site’s gruesome ardor for PDFs, you’ll find some informative and eye-opening stuff. From their fact sheets page:

Are You Chronically Disorganized? - The obligatory self-test. Mmm…yeah, I am guilty of #17: “Is it difficult for you to part with things even though they have outlived their usefulness?”
Time Management for the Chronically Disorganized - “Remember that you are procrastinating if you work on a trivial task while a more important one remains undone.”
Tips for Communicating with the Chronically Disorganized - “Avoid what does not work…Don’t say: ‘Just do it!’”

I really liked some of the Tips for Overcoming Procrastination for the Chronically Disorganized Individual or Household (excerpted):

Remember that it is motivation that gets you started and habits that keep you going. Resolve to get started.

Delay until you have enough information but not all the information. Have the courage to make decisions with less than 80% of the facts.

Break up your projects into small pieces and avoid “all or nothing” thinking.

Good stuff. The Now Habit, anyone?

”Links and Resources for the Chronically Disorganized” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 06, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

WWLD? No. 3: Organizing your environment

glassdog — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 10:43:30 -0500

Our great friend, Leslie Harpold, passed away in December of last year. In addition to being a swell pal and an old-school web mandarin, Leslie was an endless source of advice and opinion on ~~practically~~ everything.
To commemorate Leslie’s life and to help share her wisdom with folks who never got to know her, I asked our mutual friend, Lance Arthur to answer the question: What Would Leslie Do? Here’s part 3 of 4. — mdm

1. A place for everything.

This has been an especially valuable lesson for me. It’s easy and common to toss your keys and wallet somewhere when you enter your home. If you’re not tossing them in the same place every time, the next time you’re about to leave and need your keys to get back inside, you may not remember where it was you tossed them — or maybe you left them in a pocket without tossing them at all, but which pocket was it? What were you wearing, and where is that article of clothing now?

Getting organized doesn’t necessarily mean stopping by the Pottery Barn and gathering up a bunch of little containers and hooks and coat racks for everything, it’s more important — and easier — to simply designate a place for things, and keeping everything in its place.

2. Make your bed.

When we’re kids, we’re told to make our beds. When I was a kid, I thought this was the most supremely stupid and asinine idea I ever heard, but when you’re a kid almost everything sounds stupid and asinine. When we get older and can make our own decisions about things, some of us decide that we don’t want to make our beds any longer, because they’ll only get messed up again later.

Now consider your last vacation. Even if you were only paying $100 a night (or, more likely, a lot more than that) for a room in a hotel, and you came back to your room and found that housekeeping had not done their duty and made your bed for you, would you have shrugged and said, “eh, whatever, I don’t even make my own bed,” or would you have grumbled internally at how unkempt and messy everything looked?

Making your bed has a ripple effect, believe it or not. It only takes a few extra minutes in the morning, and the benefit is that when you climb in at night, the sheets are crisp and smooth, the blanket lies where it’s supposed to without a lot of rearranging, and your pillows are already fluffed and huggable. You get to have that soothing all-encompassing feeling of comfort every night just by making your bed every morning. And it’s amazing how much more put-together a bedroom looks with a well-made bed.

3. Schedule the simple tasks.

On which day of the week do you water your plants? Which day is set aside for vacuuming? When do you clean your bathrooms? When do you scrub the shower? When you’re doing laundry, when do you include the sheets and towels?

When you start to schedule the week-to-week or month-to-month tasks, they get done! It’s amazing! But when do you need to do them, and how often?

Here are Leslie’s Rules of Thumb for a few simple tasks. Adjust as necessary according to your own needs, of course.

Water your plants once a week on Thursday. Don’t do it on a weekend. Nobody wants to do anything on a weekend.
Except laundry. Do your laundry as early as possible on Saturday. Even if you live alone, you will always have enough dirty clothes to do one load every week. This may mean not sleeping in on Saturdays, but a non-standard sleep schedule is bad for your health, anyway.
You should wash your sheets and towels every week. Yes, every week. Do you know how much skin you’re rubbing off on your sheets? And towels gather moisture and can become musty. Nobody wants to step out of a hot shower and wrap themselves in fungus.
Vacuum your entire house while your laundry is in the washer. You can do that. Both things take between 20 and 30 minutes.
When you put your laundry in the dryer, dust the house. Dusting should take some time, because you have to move things around and dust under them. Yes, boys, dust under things, not around them.
Fold the laundry immediately. Don’t pile it onto the couch or bed and leave it for later.

One more tip for an awesome bed: Iron your pillow cases. Just your pillow cases. That will make your whole bed seem more tidy, and you can even spritz them with lavender water, so your nose can sleep tight, too.

4. Empty the kitchen sink.

Your kitchen can become a sloppy mess in less than a day, but you can prevent it if you just do one simple thing. Keep your kitchen sink empty. Don’t pile the dirty dishes in the sink, wash them as you use them. Get a soap brush (Oxo makes an excellent one) and rinse the glass with hot water and set it in a dish rack to dry. As you cook, rinse your tools and pots. If you have a dishwasher, you lucky thing, rinse things and put them in there. But do not leave anything in the sink.

The sink is like a magnet, or the core of planet Kitchen. Everything starts there and spreads outward. If you start leaving things in the sink until it’s full, you start piling on the counters. Then the stove top. Then inside the oven. You’ll start to pile things on any and every surface available because, suddenly, you can’t use your sink to rinse or wash anything. Keep your sink empty, and everything else tends to stay that way, too.

Lance’s What Would Leslie Do? Series

”WWLD? No. 3: Organizing your environment” was written by Lance Arthur for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 28, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Becoming a tagging kung-fu master

Ian Beck — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 09:28:24 -0400

You’ve heard the hype about tagging. You’ve seen people flocking to sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, where they jump head-first into a pulsing mass of disjointed tags, possibly never to be heard from again. And you’ve wondered: how exactly is tagging worthwhile again?

Any idiot can tag, but you want tags that are useful rather than a disorganized mess. This is not an unreasonable desire, and by completing three simple steps before you start tagging, you too can become a tagging kung-fu master. (Or, if you want more intellectual cred, explicate your personal taxonomy.)

Whether you are tagging in a private, public, or collaborative system, consistency is the byword when tagging. Without a consistent pattern you won’t know what tags to assign items, what tags to search for to find items, or what items you’ll likely get while browsing your tags. The following three steps will help you create a consistent pattern to follow. Even if you’ve been tagging for a while, you may find these steps helpful to refine your knowledge of your own tagging habits and practices. (Please note, however, that these steps are focused on developing a personal tagging system; to optimize your tagging for collaborative use you would need to develop your system somewhat differently.)

Step 1: Know what

Are you tagging PDFs in Yep, notes in Notae, characters in Avenir, or photos in iPhoto ‘08? Whether you’re tagging in one program or several, you need to make a list of the general types of different items that you want to tag.

Tagging many different kinds of items does not make planning a tagging system much more complicated, but because you’ll tag different kinds of items differently you definitely need to think about what you’re going to tag.

Step 2: Know when

Part of knowing your target is knowing what kind of metadata is already available to you (through, say, Spotlight or the Finder) and not duplicating that metadata in your tags. For instance, every file in Mac OS X has a date created and date modified attached to it. As a result, tagging your files with a date is typically a silly idea. Tagging Word documents “word” is also redundant; the system knows which documents are Word documents and finding all of them is only a saved search away. Before you proceed to the third step, you need to make sure you know what information about your target you already have available. You don’t have to write it down if you don’t want to; just be aware.

Although there may be some situations in which you want to tag an item with every possible tag you can think of, most of the time you will want to keep your tags succinct and well-targeted, which means avoiding redundancy. Tags may be extremely flexible but they are the least efficient kind of metadata in some ways because they have no indication what they are marking. When you search the “date modified” field, you know exactly what you’re finding. An “05-31-2007” tag, on the other hand, could be any number of things.

Step 3: Pick your attributes

This is the heart of a consistent tagging system, and can be summed up in a single question: how do you think about the item you are tagging? For instance, when you are filing or searching for a photo, what do you think of? The location of the photo? The subject or people in the photo? The event taking place when you took the photo? Something else entirely?

Write out a list of the attributes that you think of when thinking of your target items. Ideally, you should make this a brainstormed list that includes every attribute you can possibly think of that you might want to tag. As you make the list for your different target items, star the attributes that spring immediately to mind.

Once you have a list, go through it to weed out the attributes that are covered by the item’s non-tag metadata. Then go through it again and pick out what attributes you want to use for tagging. Try to keep it a short, specific list focused on the attributes that sprang immediately to mind. You should also add attributes that didn’t spring immediately to mind, but that you want to make a habit of tagging anyway because they will be useful.

When you have this list of attributes, you are ready to tag. You should probably put your list of attributes somewhere visible, for example a Post-It by your computer or a virtual sticky note on-screen, at least until you’ve either memorized them or developed good tagging habits.

When you’re tagging, try to consistently attach a tag for every one of the attributes that you’ve selected. The more often you can hit all of them, the easier it will be for you to find files later. Additionally, knowing what attributes you are tagging makes coming up with specific tags much easier. Rather than sitting worrying over every photograph you can quickly attach a location, person, and event (or whatever attributes you decide on). Ideally, your attributes and tags should fit into the following sentence: “This [item]’s [attribute] is [tag].” For example, “this photo’s location is New York.”

The specific tags that you use will doubtless shift over time and circumstance, but the attributes that you are tagging should remain much more stable. By defining a standardized set of attributes for each kind of item that you are tagging and only deviating when necessary (or when the way you think about a given type of item begins to change), you will be able to create a consistent tagging system that helps you find items quickly because it matches the way you think.

And more importantly, you will have taken your first steps on the road to becoming a full tagging kung-fu master. Or developing a stream-lined personal taxonomy. Whichever works for you.

”Becoming a tagging kung-fu master” was written by Ian Beck for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 05, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Converting clutter from trash to treasure

Merlin Mann — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 10:01:49 -0400

Quick way to dispose of lots of stuff? | Ask MetaFilter

Wow, talk about good timing.

I’ve noticed in comments on this week’s clutter posts that there’s a lot of interest from you all in the away part of “throw away” — people seem to have a lot of ideas on the most interesting, charitable, creative, and environmentally-responsible routes for converting your own trash into someone else’s treasure.

So far we (and that AskMe thread) have covered:

Recycling
Goodwill (and similar charities)
1-800-GOT-JUNK (and similar services)
Craigslist (and other classified avenues)
eBay (and other online sales ideas)
Freecycle
Putting it on the street with a “Free” sign

What’s your creative solution? Let’s try to avoid names of specific businesses and charities except inasmuch as they offer a truly creative and non-obvious solution to reuse or recycling. What’s the most interesting way you’ve cleared your crap while doing some good? Have you got any suggestions that are clever and convenient?

”Vox Pop: Converting clutter from trash to treasure” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 04, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

My War on Clutter: The Tools to Purge BIG

Merlin Mann — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 05:43:44 -0400

[This is a first-person account of what’s worked for me in preparing to gut the crap out of my house; you should feel free to do or not do any part of this — or just adjust the recipe to whatever suits your own needs, hangups, household fetishes, and budget. But you knew that, right?]

My past attempts at removing clutter have consistently bottlenecked at a few common points. Often I wasn’t really committed to the idea of a full purge, so I’d ignore whole boxes of memorabilia. Other times, my goal was primarily aesthetic, so I’d end up shoveling things into pretty boxes and “organizers”. But I finally realized what’s really been stopping me from accomplishing anything substantial. It’s so simple and so dumb that I’m embarrassed to admit it: my garbage can was too small.

Yeah, I mean that both literally and figuratively. Because part of my success in purging this time around has come from thinking much bigger in every way — I want bigger changes from throwing out more stuff including the big dumb items that won’t fit in a garbage can. Here’s some tools and processes that have helped me.

Basic supplies

The Brute Trash Can
Merlin’s new best friend

First, I went to the store and bought two 32-gallon Brute trash cans, ten 12-gallon boxes, and a huge-ass roll of contractor bags.

One Brute can is for straight-up trash, and the other is for recycling (primarily paper); each gets lined with a contractor bag. If you’ve never used a contractor bag, you’re in for a treat — these things are tough as nails and can take almost anything you throw at ‘em without tearing. You can even drag them to the curb without a peep.

The boxes I use to temporarily group and store stuff like DVDs, CDs, and books — stuff that has made the first cut of de-cluttering, but that still need to be re-evaluated once I can see all of each item in one place (more on this in Walsh’s book and in an upcoming post). These boxes aren’t cheap, but they’re sturdy, they stack neatly, and you can see the contents without needing to mark them. To me, it’s worth the dough, because speed and convenience are factors, plus I can eventually reuse a few of these for actual long-term storage once I’m done (and any remainders will nest neatly in a stack).

Establish a “dump zone”

TIP:
Use red gaffer’s tape to lay down a perimeter around your Dump Zone. Make it easy to see when you’re ready to schedule another dump run or drop-off.

Next, we cleared a space in the back of the garage to use as a “dump zone.” Any non-perishable trash, recycling, and large, unbagged items go straight into this area as soon as they’re identified and ready to go.

I cannot overstate the importance of making a zone like this early in your project. You must know without hesitation that whatever you run across — no matter how big or bulky — will find a temporary home in your dump zone before quickly being whisked out of your house forever. Seriously, if you could have gotten rid of that coat rack any other way, why haven’t you? Put it in the dump zone, and get back to work. Volume, volume, volume.

Schedule the funeral

Try Freecycle:
Freecycle connects people who want to get rid of stuff with people who want that stuff. Purge with a conscience, and do someone a proper. Learn more from Unclutterer.

Finally, decide on your strategy for how the stuff will get out of your house, and schedule it. Whether you plan on dump runs, putting stuff on Craigslist, donating to Freecycle, or renting a 9-yard dumpster (yeah, I did that once), do make a hard appointment in the next week for making sure that this stuff will disappear — even if that’s an appointment with yourself, get it on the calendar and honor it.

Want to know what I did? I hired SF Hauling (Yelp). Tell James that Merlin sent you. These guys were amazing. I set up a time, they came to the house, and for a surprisingly modest price, they loaded and hauled my stuff away to be recycled or dropped off at the dump. In 15 minutes their guys filled a pickup truck, and I didn’t have to lift a finger. (Hint: try searching Yelp or Craigslist to find a similar service in your area.)

But why does this scheduling matter? Why is this crucial to success? Why can’t you just keep a casual pile of “to donate” stuff in a corner forever? Because you must not live with the stuff you’ve decided to get rid of, and setting a date-certain for when it will go away gives you incentive to fill your dump zone with as much crap as you can. If you hesitate here, I guarantee that you’ll end up right back where you started — you’ll have wasted your time moving a bunch of shit from one place to another, then the cycle just starts over. Trust me: I had the coat rack to prove it.

Schedule it now.

Once more, unto the breach

10 Excuses:
Peter Walsh’s book, It’s All Too Much, explores 10 excuses people give for suffering clutter. Excuse #1 is “I might need it one day.” Know what? You won’t.

Once you have the tools you need and have scheduled your crap’s means of egress, then you can spend all your available time up til dump day filling bag after bag with dumb stuff — and you’ll never have to hesitate, thinking you’ll overfill your city trash can or overwhelm the recycling dudes. You can just focus on moving huge volumes of junk into the dump zone and out of your life.

Drawers full of broken pencils? Into the bag. Boxes of magazines you’ll never read? Into the bag. Cupboards full of “collectible” cups and baskets of single socks? Into. The. Bag.

Like I say, you should do whatever works for you, but like any life-hacky trick, remember that this works because you’re setting rules and accepting constraints. If you could do this without a system, why haven’t you?

These are the basics of my system, and they are working for me. More on the subtler processes of uncluttering forthcoming. But, whatever you do: think big and then get going.

”My War on Clutter: The Tools to Purge BIG” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 03, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

My War on Clutter: Never "organize" what you can discard

Merlin Mann — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:32:11 -0400

One of the most basic concepts Peter Walsh talks about in It’s All Too Much brought a total breakthrough for me. If the stuff that you accumulate doesn’t help get you closer to the life you want to have, it’s simply not worth keeping. Period.

Obviously (and unavoidably), this goes for a family room that’s turned into a junk drawer for DVDs and books, and you can clearly see it evidenced in a kitchen where no flat surface is free of junk mail, bills, and newspapers. Those you can’t miss.

But, for me, the real story is about the ways you try to solve clutter problems solely by getting more space or obtaining more containers — jamming all those DVDs into cabinets and stuffing those newspapers into bigger volume baskets. The clutter doesn’t need a prettier package; it just needs to go. Now, and in very large quantities.

Historically, my “housecleaning” has almost always consisted of precisely this kind of illusory shuffling — just getting things out of sight with only minimal discarding. If I could cram random stuff into a spanking new “solution” from The Container Store, I’d tend to feel like I’d really made progress.

The truth is that this is like covering your tumor with a bandage, and without thoughtful paring-down, all those crates and boxes and storage spaces do nothing to improve the basic problem. In fact, in my own experience, it makes the matter ten times worse, since you generate an entire underworld of physical goods that mean nothing to you. Your home or office becomes little more than a costly bucket for dead and useless crap.

So, above all, my first change in attitude has been about making things that definitely don’t belong go away quickly — not by generating false relevance by “organizing” them. For me, this means the opposite action; disinterring every sarcophagus of crap in my house and, item by item, evaluating how it’s making my family’s life better. You can’t believe how emotionally complex this is for a craphound like me, but once I get started, it’s completely exciting — the illusion that all this junk is making me happy melts away with every scrap of paper or broken piece of equipment I can get out of the way.

Also, I’ve found that something unbelievable and almost magical happens once I get into this mode: I start seeing things that I hadn’t ever noticed. Like the phone cords and SCSI cables.

See: during my last attempt at “cleaning up,” I (seemingly sensibly) focused primarily on organization, or the idea that most of my problem came out of not keeping like with like. So, I was very proud of myself after I’d spend the better part of two days ensuring that USB cables, ethernet cables, firewire cables, SCSI cables, and RJ-45 phone cords were all neatly separated and stored in their proper boxes.

Whoa, wait a minute. SCSI cables? Phone cords?

About half a day into my current scorched earth purge, I glanced across the office to see a box with eight different phone cords in it. Eight. This notwithstanding the fact that I have a single VoIP line and haven’t used a dial-up modem in 6 years. And SCSI cables? My God! I haven’t had a SCSI device hooked to my Mac in almost as long. Yet there they were, nicely organized and ready to serve their non-existent purpose.

Now they’re gone.

I’m finally getting my head around the idea that organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love — it’s not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to impart makebelieve meaning. And even though that 50-pin SCSI cable cost me a fortune in 1998, there’s zero reason for me to have it today. And, yet, there’s an invisible but very real cost associated with keeping it around.

As you wage your war on clutter, you will have many moments where you pause, item in hand, over the trash or recycling and feel resistance and fear. Sometimes its for cause, and you’ll elect to keep it, but also be prepared to let go on an unprecedented scale. Think volume and be brutal in your evaluations.

GTD‘ers know not to let pointless actions into their projects; why would you suffer pointless physical crap in your life?

”My War on Clutter: Never "organize" what you can discard” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 02, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

My War on Clutter

Merlin Mann — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:44:14 -0400

As I mentioned the other day, I learned about the anti-clutter book, It’s All Too Much, when its author, Peter Walsh, was interviewed for the Unclutterer site.

Well, the timing must have been right, because I bought a copy, and by the time I’d finished the first chapter, a switch had flipped in my head. I say “timing” because, while the book is pretty good (if perhaps not particularly groundbreaking), the author’s observations on why people allow themselves to live with too much crap were an overdue existential bitchslap for me. And, I’ll admit, he has simple cures for dealing with this seemingly intractable challenge, and for me that’s a hard combination to beat.

Clutter of every kind has been the default state of my physical world forever. Although no official record of the conversation exists, I would not be surprised to learn that I tried to talk the staff who delivered me into letting me keep my first diaper; just because — y’know — you never know when it might come in handy. Bad habits formed early, bad habits stuck, and, for the most part, bad habits remain intact to this day.

It’s All Too Much
by Peter Walsh

I lugged unnecessary crap through 3 moves a year in college, then entered a young adult life of unopened cardboard boxes and the omnipresent cruft of consumer existence. In addition to being a bit of a pig, I was also what Cory Doctorow calls “a craphound.” I had ersatz collections of stuff everywhere. But it wasn’t just ephemerabilia — I also lived with last week’s dishes, last month’s beer cans, last year’s TV Guide. You name it, I was not throwing it away.

Despite at least two purges of epic proportion in the late 90s, I moved to California with a lot of those same boxes — still unopened — and, although I did leave the empty beer cans in Tallahassee, the bad habits happily flew cross-country with me. Today, despite 7½ years of gentle intervention from a wonderfully tidy woman, I can still see ample evidence of my bad decision-making, twisted sentimentality, and utter failure to sensibly incorporate my worldly belongings into the space that’s available to contain them.

This bit from Chapter 3 of Walsh’s book is typical of the sections I’d credit with highlighting my awareness of the need for a change:

The things you own are a distraction to getting started on the right path. The key to getting — and staying — organized is to look beyond the stuff and imagine the life you could be living. Put most simply: It’s about how you see your life before all else.

Good stuff.

The problem is about more than just cubic inches of physical space — it becomes about cubic yards of mindshare when the state of your surroundings starts to define the promise of your future. The mindless junk of your past crowds out opportunities and sets pointless limitations. Pretty soon those “collectibles” start to seem a lot less valuable, and the baseline junk begins to look a lot less harmless. At least that’s been the revelation for me: clutter is not without its very real costs every day.

Anyway, this is all in the service of saying I’ve now spent the better part of the last 5 days throwing out crap, and I’m just getting started. This has been so alternately exhausting and exhilarating that I wanted to share some of it with you.

So over the next couple days, I’ll be writing about and linking to ideas that might help you wage your own war on clutter. Most of this won’t be brand new insight by a long shot, but if you have the clutter (and the ears to hear about some solutions), maybe you can join me in digging a tunnel to a more crap-free life.

”My War on Clutter” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 02, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Populi: Best practices for file naming

Merlin Mann — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:26:23 -0400

If it wasn’t apparent from my pathetic cry for help the other day, even I — one of your more theoretically productive persons in North America — struggle with what to call things.

Tags, files, and — dear Lord — the innumerable assets associated with making web sites, graphics, audio, and video projects; it’s all a hopeless jumble unless you have some kind of mature system in place for what you call your stuff and its various iterations. Of course, if you’re like me — and I hope that you are not — you still have lots of things on your desktop with names like “thing-2 finalFinal! v3 (with new changes) 05b.psd”.

For prior art, I still treasure this Jurassic thread on What Do I Know where people share their thoughts on this age-old problem, but, frankly I haven’t seen many good resources out there on best practices for naming.

Anyhow, during a recent MacBreak shoot, I noticed that Alex and his team seem to have a pretty fly system for naming the video files that eventually get turned into their big-time IPTV shows. Thus, I turned to Pixel Corps’ Research Division Lead, Ben Durbin (co-star of Phone Guy #5) for insight and sane help. And, brother, did he ever give it to me (see below the cut for Ben’s detailed awesomeness).

But, just so I don’t lose you, do give me your best tips in comments: What are your favorite current conventions for naming files? How does your team show iterations and versions? Do you rely more on Folder organization than file names in your work? How have Spotlight, Quicksilver, and the like changed the way you think about this stuff?

Ben shares how Pixel Corps does it, video style:

We’re still settling into best practices that are shared amongst all the teams, but here are some themes:

File names are a set of fields separated by underscores. We share files on linux servers, so while manageable, we consider spaces in filenames to be lowercase b bad.

If it’s an established or long-term project, we try to keep the codes for the various fields to three letters. This allows for more fields without having the file names get too long.

If it’s not an established project, we favor readability (longer field names) and consistency. Even if your field data are arbitrarily chosen, as long as you’re naming things consistently, you can always use batch renaming to convert a given field into a code later.

When possible, the fields are arranged left to right from general to specific.

Files that may have iterations get a three-digit, padded iteration number as their final field.

Even when we use folder structures with multiple subfolders, the project code fields stays as a prefix of all files, so that if files get misplaced, they’re still easily findable (example: all post files for a MacBreak episode will start with “mbk_eps_episodeNumber_” regardless of where they sit in the folder structure).

Caveats:

As you’ve probably noticed, the problem with file names in general is that they only give you a single “view” and aren’t applicable to other ways in which you might want to see/sort the files in other contexts. Advanced users can get all grep-daddy with it, but they’re in the minority. At best, file naming structures are a “good enough” solution that works well most of the time if you don’t have a more robust metadata system in place.

The problem with metadata systems, of course is that they tend to either be proprietary or only applicable to certain file types. Are we going to use annotations on all of our Quicktime movies? Create some custom xml format that gets parsed by a proprietary app? Structured Spotlight comments? The check-in comments of a versioning system like Subversion? The lack of a good, widely-accepted metadata framework that is spoken by all OSes and/or that can be embedded into most file types lead many people to resort to file naming structures and leave it at that.

Dang. Thanks for that, Ben!

To repeat:

What are your favorite current conventions for naming files? How does your team show iterations and versions? Do you rely more on Folder organization than file names in your work? How have Spotlight, Quicksilver, and the like changed the way you think about this stuff?

”Vox Populi: Best practices for file naming” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 23, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Sloan get organized for new record

Merlin Mann — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 09:20:19 -0400

One of my favorite bands, Sloan, has a new record called Never Hear the End of It that just came out last week in Canada (currently only purchasable via import in the US; in Canada, you can buy it on MapleMusic).

While recording the CD, Sloan also shot a bunch of short in-studio videos, including a couple that reveal their innately organizational side.

In “Shades ‘o’ Sloan”, Murph shares the color-coded card system they used to track each band members’ song status. “I’m red, and Jay’s yellow, Patrick’s green, and Andrew’s blue…”

In “Sneak Peek,” the color system returns, vaguely Mondrian-like, plus you get to hear samples from a few of the songs. I’m a big fan of “Set in Motion” (which you’ll see is Chris Murphy Red).

The tracks I’ve heard from the record are really good — probably their best since Between the Bridges.

Also, if you ever get the chance, do catch Sloan on tour when they come to your town. Always a really fun show.

[ via Mrs. Mann ]

”Sloan get organized for new record” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 27, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Glenn Wolsey: 6 email tips

Merlin Mann — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 08:53:43 -0400

Glenn Wolsey—6 Ways To Organize - Your Mail Application

Glenn Wolsey has a great little post on how he’s set up and is using Mail.app. He’s got some very smart stuff here, including an intriguing approach to minimalist mailbox management:

Create 3 folders and name them Follow-Up, Interesting & To Do. Then, as you check your emails file them straight into the applicable folder.

Later, when you have time you can go straight to these folders folder and work through them. It will be much quicker to see what needs attending to and you are more likely to might be motivated to spare a few minutes clearing your to-do folder.

The “Interesting” folder is a new one to me, and, although I personally favor a more verb-y approach to my email buckets, that would be a cool way to bubble up stuff you don’t want to miss after a big round of processing.

As we covered in Inbox Zero, it’s all about liberating the actions out of your mail. Like any of this stuff, if the system makes sense to you and gives you transparent affordances for instantly knowing “where it goes” and “what you need to do about it,” then you’re on to something.

Nice work, Glenn!

”Glenn Wolsey: 6 email tips” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 01, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"