: Re: How do I organize a massive collection of personal files and writing? Note: This is a vague question, so I welcome help in improving it. I have a large amount of writing on my computer, some

@Shelley992

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Well, that depends if and what you want to do with it. Having a lot of "great" ideas is easy, until you try to realize them (there is often a discrepancy between what one imagines it to be and what it turns out). And unless you specify what you want to do with it, there is hardly any movement possible.

However, if you want to find out what you have available, I would start by collecting your ideas (and not merely having them somewhere without any structure). There are a lot of ways to do this, from files and folders, to mind/concept maps, outliners (e.g., NeO, OmniOutliner), digital notebooks (Circus Ponies Notebook, OneNote), notes management systems (e.g., DEVONthink), visual notes management systems (Tinderbox, Curio), Wikis (DokuWiki, MediaWiki), etc.

In any case I would recommend using tags to first get an idea in which areas you have ideas, and as you mention that files can have multiple ideas, tags are the way to go (you can tag the quality of ideas, the area like "gift", "character", "plot", "object", etc.). Personally, I love DEVONthink for this, because it augments the File/Folder system, gives you tags and immediately identifies duplicates based on the file content (see this blog entry on my blog). It's a Mac program, but there should be similar solutions for Windows.

After tagging and getting an impression which projects are feasible (creativity is more than one idea and a good collection helps you to generate and collect the necessary ideas) you can decide for a project to realize -- and make something out of your ideas.

For more information I'd point to a book I've written recently -- it's available as PDF 'for free' (Donationware, once I finish with the ePub version). It essentially covers the whole process.

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