That tool, video, photo, plug-in, audio file, sketchbook….
That’s the question of the creative who has no organized creativity with the tools, resources, b-roll video, audio recordings, sketched ideas at their hands because they have not assigned a place for it.
There’s a couple of things that come to mind as I share this thought:
Casey Neistat (youTuber/creative) has — or had — one of the most organized studios and we get to take tour of it if you search it on YouTube. He shares his thought behind how if everything has it’s place then it’s easy to get to it when needed.
Daniel Levitin wrote a book by the title The Organized Mind which I reference quiet a bit because he also shares how externalizing the mind and organizing it can help improve focus/productivity and well we know a creative person with ideas need more of that.
I’m not sure if Casey Neistat ever shared how he organizes his digital data but if we had to organize it according to Daniel Levitin’s research and book I would say that we can take an approach of making organizing our digital files into an easy to search system just like our minds can search for random memories when something triggers it. You know that scent that takes you back to your home during grade school that triggers the mind to cue up a memory of your childhood days. The mind immediately takes the scent and matches it to a memory. (Don’t quote me on that – there’s a lot more science to that.)
Same thing with our creative inspiration – you may hear a song about traveling and you want to create a video and you remember that you have videos of the road from some b-roll you randomly shot on your family roadtrips the last two years. If you had this system in place you would have labeled your digital files somewhere along the lines of: “video – b-roll – road – July 2019” and now you could just search for “b-roll – road” to pull it up.
This is for digital files… for analog files and tools you can create physical systems as well — filing cabinets, tool organization drawers and maybe create an excel spreadsheet of all the inventory you own to keep tabs and not buy the same tool over and over because you don’t remember where it’s at or if you even own one.
Where is that idea for the blog post I had today? Oh yeah – in my creative planner and now I am just finishing up the written post for the idea. 🙂