Before you go getting your hopes up, this is not a How-To Guide. It’s more of a support group, if anything. So if you are digitally disorganized, you are welcome here. If you digitally organized, you are super welcome here and also hey don’t be a gatekeeper - share your secrets.
As a tech consultant with a background working with large teams on hugely complicated projects, I have an almost pathological interest in how people organize their digital work. I’m not picky, either. Digital file folders, Notion templates, Click-up boards, Reminders List or Notes app - I’m interested. There’s as many ways to digitally organize yourself as there are people (do not argue with me, Getting Things Done diehards. I see you and respect you from afar).
So I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. But no pressure.
I want to talk about that one at the bottom: Slush Pile.
My personal slush pile is full of fragments. Transcribed free-writes, collected scenes I cut from stories, some chaos copied into a Real Document(TM) from the Notes app (big upgrade for my random brain-dump ideas).
The hoi polloi of prompt responses, if you will.
A lot of these started as warm-up writing exercises. A 15-20 minute free write to get in the zone before working on a bigger, more longitudinal project. They aren’t special. But I transcribe them anyway. Saved into the Slush Pile with names like Violin, or Rainbow, or (I am for real) Non-vegan Clueless Boyfriend.
These are all real files currently in my Slush Pile folder, scout’s honor.
If you write, you hopefully write a lot. I once heard Margaret Atwood advise someone who wanted to be a writer to “read and read and read and write and write and write.”
So if you write a lot, this accumulation is inevitable. In notebooks and files and, yes, the Notes app. Guilty.
The real question is: how are we organizing our digital writing lives when the fragments multiply? What’s your taxonomy for creativity? Do your files follow a naming convention? Do you use tags or folders? Are you living on a notebook and a prayer?
Asking because I’m always keeping an eye out for some process improvement.
Until I think of something better (but something foolproof, not fussy) the Slush Pile folder it is.
Sometimes I do have an idea for how to rework something and go looking in the pile. And sometimes I think... maybe the next thing I want to say is hiding in there, waiting to be reread and brought back into the daylight.
Probably not though. Maybe I just need an external hard drive.