Organizing

Today is the first official day of spring. The air is crisp and the sunshine is encouraging new growth.

I don’t like spring cleaning, but I do like organizing. Finding solutions for controlling clutter. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Yesterday and today I organized my writing notes. I had several different word documents that had grown into a complicated mess. A mix of writing advice and research in the form of links and copied text, and my own random thoughts and preliminary writing. I really needed to straighten it all out.

No organizational system is useful unless it is easy to use. (“Keep it simple, stupid.”) I decided to combine everything, because one organized document will be easier to maintain. But I needed to group like things together. First I made copies of each original document, in case I accidentally deleted anything during all the necessary cutting and pasting. Then I went through each document, quickly reading just enough to identify chunks of text and label them. At the beginning of each chunk I typed a few characters (a tag) that I would be able to search on, for example *R* for a chunk related to research. I used the asterisks so the tags wouldn’t be confused with regular text (the word “research” might be used in a chunk of writing advice).

Then I went back to the beginning of each document and used the Find function to search for each tag. I copied the chunks and pasted them into the appropriate section (corresponding to the tag) of my new word document. Whenever I pasted in a new chunk, I edited the text, making sure it was concise and in a consistent format. I used bold and underline to highlight key phrases.

At the beginning of each section I inserted a bookmark, and at the top of the document I inserted hyperlinks to the corresponding bookmarks. These links should make it easy to go to each section of the document when I want to add another note or read previous notes. I deleted the old documents to avoid confusion going forward. Now I have one master document (49 pages) of notes for my writing project.

Having all my notes in one organized document relieves the stress of worrying that I might lose track of something important. It frees my mind for new ideas.