---
title: "on organisation"
date: 2023-04-26
---

i'm the kind of person who feels like theyre always being assaulted by a million thoughts and exposed to a million concepts that i might want to revisit: a cool new art style or technique, a game or album or movie that i want to experience, or a friend i haven't caught up with in the last couple of weeks. this used to cause me a great deal of fomo, or something similar, as these thoughts that feel desperately important fall away was a new task appears. i would then remember that there was _something_ important going on in my head a few hours later, but i would have no idea what that _something_ actually was. i hope that this is a pretty universal experience, and if it isn't i am extremely envious of the people who can just let thoughts come and go (i did learn to do this while doing mindfulness classes, but i feel that the intention there is a bit different)

so i've recognised that i need to do _something_ about the _something_ that i'm forgetting, but i'm not entirely sure what the _something_ i need to do is. in fact, i've just added to the thoughts bouncing around my head by thinking about the thoughts bouncing around my head. it's sort of like the anxiety snowball effect where you start feeling anxious about how anxious you feel

### the organisation balancing act
from my fiddling around with different systems, i've landed on two key variables that are going to determine how useful an organisation system will be for you: ease of storage vs ease of recall. an ultimate system would be super quick for you to put your thoughts down and let you go back to whatever you were doing (ease of storage), as well as super easy for you to find a specific note or thought the moment you want to bring it back (ease of recall). unfortunately, it seems like the best of both worlds doesn't really exist. for example, a notebook is insanely quick to write in, but it can be a real job to hunt down something from a couple of months ago. on the other hand, i can store an image that uses a shadow technique that i would like to replicate in a set of nested directorys (art-inspiration > technique > shadow), and then pull up a bunch of shadow technique inspirations when i want to practice, but navigating through all those directories is a nuisance. additionally, what if that image also has a pose that i really like, or what if i forget that theres a specific directory for shadow techniques and i make another one somewhere else?

### tagging
the latter issue can be somewhat fixed with tagging systems; theyre much easier to navigate, and they allow you to associate one item with multiple concepts. the real issue is that almost nothing _truly_ supports tagging in a way that i find satisfying. obsidian needs bulky frontmatter, pinterest needs more clicks. tumblr supports it rather smoothly, but racking your brain for everything about the image you might want to recall later sucks, and if i'm on my phone i just want to store it and keep scrolling. you could do it after the fact but are you really going to spend half an hour a day tagging everything after the fact instead of doing something fun? let's not even start on windows' support for tagging. i spent a couple of days trying to work out a script to use image recognition to automatically tag images so that they would be easier to find in local storage, before i was blissfully informed that the clusterfuck that is windows search indexing would basically make that useless

### obsidian 
let's put storing images and bookmarks on hold for a second and just focus on note taking. i've mentioned obsidian a couple of times now. the app boasts a pretty similar interface to a modern ide and it flaunts the honestly quite solid benefit of keeping all of your note taking to local, simply formatted files. if you can effectively keep your files in parity between all of your note taking devices, this sounds like a great system to take advantage of the benefits of digital note taking over physical. digital in particular actually provides a solution to the issue i dismissed at the start of this paragraph, because a text file is a great place to store references to images and websites with descriptive text and links. 

so i had a crack at obsidian for a couple of months. i think the real issue is that it actually has more functionality than the average note-taker needs: the most touted is the ability to make connections between files with tags and links, supplemented by the apps ability to make nifty graph views reminiscent of those maps of the internet:

<img src="/_assets/img/on_organisation/graph.webp"/>

this is mine! cool right? you can see groups of notes related to music in the top right, videogames in the top left, journals and contacts in the bottom right and general miscellania everywhere else. the real issue is that this system is deeply deeply useless. i have basically never used my links to navigate between files, and the tags are largely unnecessary because i can just remember a word or two that i know is in the title or body of a file and search for it that way

fundamentally, this functionality is designed for researchers and students who have huge complicated webs of concepts and documents that are much harder to keep in (wetware) memory. i've also seen people use them for tracking things like a dnd game, and that looks totally cool. for personal notes, however, i don't recommend it; it's basically the programmer's equivalent of making a bullet journal and spending fifteen minutes on each page writing a title in cursive and ruling each area in multicoloured felt tip pens. 

all this said, as a place to keep simple text notes, especially as a holding area for them to be moved elsewhere, obsidian is great. i still use it for many things, especially note tasks where markdown shines (tracking the progress of a software project and the steps required to recreate it is a big one). its more just an issue that obsidian is sold as a solve-all system where i think there are better options

my obsidian thoughts are more or less in line with this [great article by fernando borretti](https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought) where they talk about pushing away from this line of thinking that you need a single tool for organisation

### bullet journals
i'm actually writing this out of order for dramatic effect. bullet journals were one of the first systems i tried using after the old faithful "just having a small book on you all the time". i think the bullet journal also tries to be a solve-all system, but its underlying system is genius. for those unaware, a bullet journal is just a list of thoughts, with certain dot points depending on the type:

• a dot for a task  
x a cross for a completed task  
< / > / V an arrow for a moved task  
\- a hyphen for a thought  
○ a circle for an event  

this shorthand makes the bulk of a bullet journal super easy to read at a glance:

<img src="/_assets/img/on_organisation/bullet_journal.webp"/>

i've been using this system with a pocket notebook for years now, as it allows me to take notes of tasks blazingly fast and dismiss them from my mind. 

this is technically only the daily log part of a bullet journal: the journal also has a monthly and future log that let you move things out of the daily log when it isn't optimal for them to be there. this seems like a super slick system if the bullet journal is all that you're using, but the next two tools cover these requirements a bit better in my usecase: past events are put in a journal, and future events, as well as high priority tasks like paying bills are put in my google calendar.

### journal journals
journalling sucks. i'm sure we've all had multiple moments where we've bought a nice leather bound a5 booklet and written a full page of events and thoughts for three to five days before missing a day and deciding that it's not all worth the trouble. reducing friction is always the trick with these things so i started dividing up pages from my a6 pocket notebooks into eight sections, with one section for each day. this gives me about a hundred words, meaning that i need to stick to the absolute most objective events of the day. i then rely on my feeble mind to recall the more interesting parts of the events that i've written down when i revisit them in the future. 

### google calendar / maps / contacts
i've been a heavy google calendar and maps user for years. as far as i'm concerned, some kind of online calendar is an absolute must for any adult in the year of our lord 2023, and its the one organisation tool on this page that i would recommend unconditionally. there might be some better options out there, and i do have complaints about how the tasks and reminders are a little clunky, but for blocking out my days it is indispensable.

google maps plays quite nicely with google's other tools, and i almost exclusively use it to tag locations that i want to come up first in searches (⭐) places that i want to go (🚩) and places that i have enjoyed (❤️). it also (creepily) tracks the locations that you've been, which gives me a great record for the times when i do forget and need the info for my journals

google contacts seems a bit obvious, but its super useful for tracking random people that i meet at parties and events. you can also save important data about people like birthdays and anniversary dates, and the notes tab lets you stuff whatever else you want to against their name. i guess my real advice is that contacts are great when used as a place to take any personal notes you think you'll need, rather than just a spot where you keep people's phone numbers.

### art organisation
keeping my art references and inspiration in check is truly an unfathomable clusterfuck. i like to keep track of video and image tutorials, construction images and stylistic inspirations in terms of character looks, expressions, techniques, composition. i also like to hold on to specific artists who tick a bunch of these boxes, because they act as a bit of a box of all these valuable pieces, as well as someone who can be contacted for info and advice. this data is spread across my tumblr, instagram saves, pinterest, phone storage, pc storage, and bookmarks and open tabs on my four devices. it is frankly impossible to keep on top of. 

of all the ways to organise your art references and inspiration, pinterest has the most potential, as you can pull images and videos from anywhere* on the internet and arrange them as you see fit. pinterest is understandably a boon for a lot of artists, but it is very easy to organise your references poorly and find yourself facing down the problem from the start of this post: an awful combination of poor ease of storage and poor ease of recall. 

### aggregators
if you've checked out my links page, you know that i get into data aggregators pretty damn hard. the impact of giving a company your personal habit data for free is questionable, but each of these sites lets me do tracking tasks in a way that is specific to each medium: last.fm automatically tracks my listening habits and gives me reports on the music and artists i've been listening to the most, anilist can also link to my manga reader, and allows me to record my progress on anime so i can pick them up without accidentally rewatching episodes, and letterboxd lets me make sassy little remarks when i thought a movie was a bit naff.

the one thing that i am dearly lacking is a way to track videogame progress and the games that i am currently playing. i've dipped my toes into [backloggery](https://www.backloggery.com/), but found it pretty lacking in features and inconvenient to update.

### less useful solutions
three organise methods that i have almost completely done away with are:  

**google keep** - a google based notes app, a la the iphone equivalent. just like it's apple sibling this app very quickly devolves into complete chaos, making it only useful as a last resort when my notebook is buried in the bottom of a bag and i need to make a note _right now_  

**bookmarks** - browser bookmarks seem like they should have a lot of potential, because they let you store any location on the internet, and they are instantly kept consistent between your devices. the real issue i've experienced with using bookmarks is that you either end up wading through nested directory hell, or you have so many top-layer directories that the bookmark you actually want is impossible to find. firefox bookmarks have a tagging system, which has potential on the surface, but is a little too clunky to keep up to date with in practice.  

**file storage** - this has the same back-to-basics feel as a pen and paper notebook. if you're finding pinterest clunky to move images around, then why not go to the most simple storage system built into your operating system? i do use file storage a little bit; most notably, i will save every image that i use in a piece of art to my pc in case i need it in the future. for mass storage and retrieval however, search is generally lacking, and the issues with keeping files consistent between multiple devices means that it's not my primary go-to

### conclusions
my overall take is that this shit is hard as hell. for day to day, my pocket journal / obsidian for long term notes / google calendar for events appears to be doing the trick. i'm probably in dire need of an audit of my pinterest and i might check out grouvee for game tracking

if you're trying to get into better organisational habits yourself, i would recommend the advice of cgp grey from [cortex podcast](https://www.relay.fm/cortex): start simple with paper and work your way up. a notebook will do an impressive amount of what you want to do, and you can identify flaws in it as a system and supplement them with other apps / systems. my one subjective bit of advice in this conclusion would be to be wary of any solve-all solution (for real, read the [fernando borretti article](https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought))

### update 2023-07-10

i am well and truly locked into [infinite backlog](https://infinitebacklog.nl/) for game tracking. i was previously using a custom obsidian system for tracking all my game stuff, and infinite backlog immediately impressed me because it used the same tiered system that i had envisioned with states of play and states of completion separated. this lets you track both a list of games that you have and haven't completed, as well as games that you are or are not playing separately. it truly ticks all the boxes for me and i'm super into it