I am in a bit of a fickle mess on how I should best organise my video and picture content across my various devices.

Producing videos and pictures of my travels and not taking the time to organise them properly has taken me down a road into a confused state. I have created a lot of material. This is very much a favourable situation given the focus on the projects I am working on. However, it is almost at an addict level of content production, and it is sprawled over into so many different devices, mediums, cards and hard drives.

I am now in a place that I am confused about where I have stuff and what stuff I have where. I have half-filled hard drives with stuff on them, a drawer with camera cards that also have stuff on them and cloud storage upon high that, to put it mildly, is a dog’s dinner of stuff.

Like I said, I have got myself into a confused state. I have disks and cards everywhere, and I am not sure if I backed them up or if I need to back them up, or what. 

I started out on the creative journey without this point in mind, and as I progressed, I knew it was a burning problem, but I ignored it. I lacked some discipline, but I also overestimated how the intelligent systems we have for managing our stuff do actually work. I gave them too much credit.

It is my own fault. I over-relied on the ‘system’ doing the work for me. I assumed, wrongly, that the combination of the timestamps and the organising tools built into the core operating system on my phone and laptop would automatically do the work for me.

I was wrong in that assumption. It didn’t exactly perform as expected.

In reality, using the inbuilt tools to organise my stuff half works. It is not productively laid out. It is a pain in the jollies to try and find the piece of content that I remember I shot, which I am looking for to fit into that all-important edit, but that has disappeared to somewhere! There is some organisation produced by the system, but it is just not how I want it.

Oh, what to do?

So I am now left with the quandary of going all out and sorting, organising and planning carefully for everything I do from now on or, I take the ball-aching prospect of the retrofit. Organising all the stuff from the past into the way of the future.

I could go back and organise all of the content that I have shot over the past eight months and put that into the process that I am looking to put in place, but that is a day’s work. It is also a day’s work in doing something terribly dull, something that is not that enjoyable for me, and it has an element of tediousness that I could do without. 

You see, I am about to go on annual leave, and I want to get out and about and shoot more content – yes, I will organise it better from now on, feedback received. Getting out and about is the exciting part. I love going to see and experience new things. I love doing the edits, but I am not a big fan of organising the content. Possibly because I have made an arse of it from the start. I didn’t think it through.

Now I need to sort it. I know I have to do it, and I will. I will tackle it on my first day of annual leave because I know it will make everything more enjoyable for the latter days.

The lessons that I have learned through this whole fiasco are as follows: cue organised thought…

• Fix in some decent process before you start any project, and as a metaphor for life, lay the foundations right in the first place.
• Research the best ways first – learn from the people who have gone before you and steal from them with pride.
• Refine the processes as you go, and don’t wait to the day where the problem is too big to tackle, and you end up putting it off until it becomes a monster.
• Look at the pain points and remedy them – what’s the point of living with pain if you can remove them, and in that process of removing them, you can learn.
• Aim for Consistency, not excellence. Consistency will deliver excellence in the long run. 
• Keep it simple because then you will definitely do it.
• Build it all around your habits and make the process you adopt all the amalgamation of tiny patterns and tweak as you go.
• Label stuff, let me say that again. Label stuff, write what it is on a label and stick it to the thing. Simple.
• Keep all the similar things together in one place. There is no point in putting your hard drive in a kitchen drawer and your camera card in your suit jacket.
• Back up as you go and back up the backup. The belt and braces approach might not be your thing but do it anyway. You will thank me later.
• When all else fails, and you have lost control, then you have to eat the frog.

“The first rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. The second rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat a live frog at all, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at it for very long.”

Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog!

So guess what, for my breakfast on the first day of my annual leave, I will have frog.