Can You Find...

What You Have?

Here's my philosophy about information and specifically information that I possess: If I can't find it, I might as well not have it.

So all the information that I possess, be it emails, pictures, videos, files, links, whatever, I can find pretty quickly. It was just a matter of setting up folders and sub-folders, and this is important, actually putting the information in those folders as it comes in.

This is much more time consuming to set up than to maintain. Once it's up and in place, it's easy to keep going. But...you have to do it, or it will just devolve into the same old mess.

So if someone sends me a picture of me playing music tonight at the Wild Goose...I label the picture: GB/Goose/10-27-16 then go to my folder called “Pictures”, subfolder “Me”, subfolder “Music”, subfolder “Wild Goose”, subfolder ”2016” and drop it in that folder. Done. And I can find it at a moment’s notice should I need it for any reason. Most of the things I file away like this, I will never use or maybe never even look at...but I have no idea which ones I will use or need to look at, so I file them all this way.

As I said, it’s a lot easier to maintain than set-up. But I took the time to do it, so now all I do is maintain it. If I have it, I can find it.

Same with emails. The only emails I keep in my inbox are pending matters like emails regarding scheduling lessons this week…or notifications of new posts from youtube channels that I subscribe to that I want to watch soon…anything that’s current and not something I want to lose or file away. Everything else I either delete, handle, and/or put in a subfolder in my email account. I have over 700 subfolders and my inbox as of this writing has one email in it. I never lose emails. Anything important I can find pretty fast.

I realize that I am a pretty organized person. For a musician, I’m like NASA level organized. But I’m not super uptight about it. I’m actually pretty relaxed about it. It’s the people who are not organized who always seem to be raging about misplacing something or other. And they’re often not too clear about their mission or purpose either. I am pretty clear about my mission. That too was harder to get clear about than maintain. But I took the time and got clear about it. Now I just want to enact that mission. Being able to find the information that I have at a moment’s notice helps me do that. So that’s why I set up my information this way. Because if I can’t find it, I might as well not have it.