It would be great if I would follow my own advice. In the chapter on “The Big Effect of Small Actions” in my book I talk about how important it is to keep up on small jobs that will inevitably balloon into large ones if neglected. (Have you noticed the new “Resources” tab on this website? You can now buy an ebook version of Intentional Happiness directly from this website as well as buying the paperback or Kindle version from Amazon.) Every time I went into the “downloads” section of my library, which is where I put the images from my wonderful image service, Dollar Photo Club, I would get irritated. ‘What a mess!’ I’d think.
‘Nothing is organized!’ Last night, more because I wanted an excuse to keep listening to yet another podcast about the whole Serial/Adnan Syed/Hae Min Lee thing than from a burning desire to get organized, I decided to get going on bringing some order out of the chaos. It took a couple of hours for me to sort through just about a year’s worth of images, so not all that many. They were all in one section of the library, but the whole process was still a massive pain, as I hadn’t come up with any consistent way of labeling the images and so had to search for the correct blog entry that matched the picture I kept coming downstairs to complain to Gideon about how hard I was working. (He wasn’t all that sympathetic.) That section of the library is now in pretty good shape, and the pictures I take myself are all automatically sorted into folders by date and so are going to be left that way. I can’t find the files with the book cover thumbnails that I use for my book reviews, but I think I’ll just leave that alone, as those are readily available from Amazon or some other bookseller if I need a duplicate. But FROM NOW ON I’m going to label images, whether online images, my own pictures, or book thumbnails, with a consistent system and keep them all together. The image for this post is labeled “IH 9-10-15 For Now.” and it’s been put in the “September” folder for “2015 Website Pictures.”
This summer Jim and I took a course from The Great Courses on photography, taught by the exceptional photograph and teacher Joel Sartore, whose work has been featured in many publications including, most notably, National Geographic. (I can’t give out any discounts on these courses as they don’t sponsor me, but they’re always offering special deals. I see that the photography course is on sale right now for not much more than we paid with our discount through Gretchen Rubin’s podcast “Happier”–if you scroll down into the body of the post on yesterday’s episode you’ll find out how to get that discount yourself, and I would heartily recommend the podcast itself.) Anyway, while I thoroughly enjoyed Joel’s lessons (all 24 of them!), the one I remember most vividly is the last one, in which he describes his filing system. You never really think about this when you’re looking at someone’s work, whatever it may be, but it wouldn’t do a bit of good to take great pictures, or write great articles, or whatever, if you couldn’t find what you needed. I took a picture of the box where I keep the scraps of paper with my scribbled ideas and said that I was using an online tool called “Scrivener” to organize all those great thoughts. Alas, I gave up yet again on using it. It’s just too complicated. So now I’m trying to use another online service that has virtual notecards, but I’m not going to give a link to it for now as I’m still struggling with that. I’ll never produce another book if I can’t organize my ideas.
So . . . the struggle continues. It’s no fun to be unable to find things, to have good ideas buried under a heap, to waste time. 30 seconds spent now saves hours down the road. So we press on!
What I thought was called the Teaching Company is really called Great Courses, so we were talking about the same thing after all. They are great!