Invest in Your Creativity by Taking the Time to Organize Your Work

The shelf above my desk collapsed, sending notebooks, thumb drives, hard drives, and my collection of trinkets crashing to the floor. The trinkets took it the hardest, shattering mugs and breaking my action figures.

Of course all that stuff is creative-project related. It represents years of work and the small trophies we collect as awards whose meaning only we understand. My officemate saw it and declared it a mess. I saw that those shelves had failed my system of meaning and remembrance.

Adding insult to injury, the shelves broke other items on my desk.

I still haven't recovered, as I'm making plans on how to restore my stuff to its former glory.

If you're like me, you have systems and cloud services for digital versions of all the stuff on my shelf. I'm referring to Dropbox, iCloud, and others like them.

Dropbox was an early entry into the market and carved out a space of having an everywhere file system. I've used it for years to gather together work projects, creative projects, and family archives and paperwork. Recently, I put a massive collection of family videos and pictures up in that cloud.

You might use OneDrive, instead, or iCloud or Google Drive for similar reasons, along with any of the several direct Dropbox competitors.

I used Evernote for 14 years (but have since transitioned to Obsidian). Evernote is great for documents, ideas, and digital ephemera from the Internet. I gathered over 27,000 notes, which I know because I exported all of them to use in Obsidian.

There are dozens of competitors, Notion being the most notorious at the moment. They all offer some version of notetaking, collecting, and project workflow.

The key is to build a system for organizing your digital life. Call it personal knowledge management, or a second brain, or anything, really; just put some thought and effort into it because it will pay dividends later.

I’m a big fan of Obsidian, which I’ll explain in another article (soon!).

What my physical shelf collapse made me realize is that those digital shelves can also collapse. I have burdened Dropbox and Obsidian with what I've gathered in both my career and life. What if they go?

You can, of course, back up those digital systems. At the moment, everything I hold dear in Obsidian is backed up to Dropbox.

And everything in Dropbox could also be on a physical hard drive. I mean it is, because that's how Dropbox works. It could also be on a secondary drive.

I probably should have a drive with an annual backup that I place in a fireproof vault offsite.

You have to examine your own needs and decided how much redundancy is enough for what you store on your digital shelves. The possibility for failure is legit, especially with malware and ransomware raging all around us.

Whatever your personal, professional, or creative pursuits are, take a few moments to understand how you'll recover from a failure, or if you need to.

A little bit of planning may prevent the loss of the digital version of your favorite mug or an action figure you cherish.

Here's an article I wrote that goes into a bit more detail if you're interested: How to Secure Your Digital Life