Getting My Digital Life Together: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at My Organization Overhaul

Welcome to another edition of the Independent Creator podcast. Tonight, I'm doing something a little different. I'm opening up our behind-the-scenes look and actually diving into trying to organize my mess of hard drives and my whole workflow for content creation.

This is something I've pretty much got down to a science now. I spent several hours today and a little bit of time yesterday going through the motions and trying to figure out a way to better organize my workflow. That's what I'm going to do tonight - open up myself to you in this kind of raw, open look at my process.

The best way to think about this is: How do you keep yourself organized? I'm not just talking about your digital files. I'm talking about your workflow. How do you create content? How do you keep track of everything? How do you stay organized and keep the organized mess away from yourself?

The Breaking Point

Looking back at my old system, it wasn't too bad. It was okay, nothing to write home about, but it was something I could keep track of. I knew I could have made things a little bit better, especially when trying to stay organized with all the logos and graphic templates I use to create thumbnails and all sorts of stuff like that.

I knew I would eventually have to come to a head and say, "I got to take care of this right here and now." Without saying "let's just burn it to the ground and start from scratch," I essentially did that. But all the stuff I had previously made, I moved it into an archive.

Discovering the PARA Method

Let me backtrack a little bit because one of the things I was looking into is the PARA method. If you've been around content creation or YouTube or anything like that, you might have come across or heard about Tiago Forte's PARA method.

PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Going through it was something I had to relearn in terms of how I organize things. The nice thing is that Tiago himself said it's not something set in stone. It's customizable to pretty much anyone and everybody. It's very dynamic.

Where I Got Lost in the Weeds

Here's where I started overthinking things. Projects are supposed to be things with an end date, right? So I'm thinking to myself, "Well, projects is stuff like videos, podcast episodes." Those are projects I can put in there. But thinking about it, yes, different episodes or different videos do have an end date when they need to be published and uploaded. But it's an ongoing thing, so it wouldn't be in the projects folder.

This is what I was going through yesterday, last night, and most of today when I was redoing all of my organization. I was getting lost in the weeds and starting to overthink things.

I started thinking, "Okay, with projects, that's good for videos, but then once they're done, I can move them into an archive." Well, I started thinking, "Why would I move them into an archive? Because it'll break all my links for my task tracking."

I have a link to where that project folder connects to the task itself. So I can easily, without having a couple of windows open, say "I need to find out what thumbnail I'll use," go to that particular task, open it up, click on the link, and it'll take me into the folder that lives on my NAS.

If I move the project folder out of projects and put it into archive, that link will be broken. I don't want to go through and have to redo a link every single time I move something.

Finding My Solution

So I'm like, "What's the next best case? Put it in areas." Well, that's what I did. But again, I started overthinking myself. I was like, "Well, if I keep it here, then it's not really a project, it's an area."

This is where I started doing more research, watching more videos, and getting ideas of different ways of organizing your file structure as a content creator. Maybe I could use a little bit of elements of PARA and something a little bit more customizable that fits my workflow and my way of thinking.

I eventually came to the conclusion that I could still use the PARA method (I'm using air quotes there), but projects are something where they stay there. They stay in the projects folder, and I don't move them to the archive.

Then it becomes a game of cat and mouse. I'll title my stuff by year, month, and date. But what happens when we go into 2026 or 2027? Instead of folders within folders within folders, I need to have minimal folders.

My New System

Let me show you what I have set up. I still use the PARA method, so I have projects, areas, resources, and archives. For projects, I decided to have a reference prefix for each folder. I created a reference sheet with abbreviations: F2H for The First Two Hours (my Independent Creator podcast), any Creator Hub, Zero Point Report, Two Ton Waffle.

So I have The First Two Hours, which is F2H, then the year, month, then date, and of course, the actual title of the project itself. So in this case, "Crazy Machines 3," which I'll be doing as part of my video series called The First Two Hours, where I play a game I've never played before for two hours and then review it.

I have them set up with a template that I copy and paste. Inside each project folder, I have:

• A-Roll: This is the talking head footage, me speaking to camera

• B-Roll: Gameplay footage or other supplementary video

• Audio Assets: All audio files for the project

• Image Assets: Promo images and Discord event banners

• Thumbnail Assets: Screenshots and elements for thumbnail creation

• Video Assets: Raw edit files that external editors can pull from

• Thumbnail Final: The completed thumbnail

• Final Render: The final version of the video after editing

• Documents: Transcripts, subtitle files, and blog post materials

The Manual Process That Works

I got this structure from another content creator (I forget their name), but this is how they lay out their YouTube video files. What they do is have this master folder structure with blank folders. All I do is right-click on it, duplicate it, take my title from Notion, create the folder, go to NextCloud, get the link, and paste it into the task field.

It's convoluted, but it works. It's a manual system that doesn't really take too much time.

Task Management Integration

I have my task tracker in Notion with all my video ideas. If you watched my video a couple of days ago, I posted a livestream about slight changes I'll be making to Any Creator Hub. One of those changes is that I want to get at least 100 video ideas posted. I'm still working on it and very far away from my goal of 100, but I gave myself at least two weeks to do it.

I have a space for the project folder where I take the link from my NextCloud (the NAS link itself) and post it up there. Then I'll enter when I'm going to be doing the recording, when I want the edits to be due (normally the day prior to the posting date), and my due date.

Why I Stuck with Notion

I know in that video I said I was going to be using ClickUp, but after I said that, I totally forgot that ClickUp comes with some caveats. If you're using the browser-based version, it's a little slow. When you go into the database, it opens up each one very slowly. I forgot about that and thought, "Do I want to deal with this for a good year before I drive myself crazy in less than a couple of weeks?"

Even though Notion has some issues, I've resigned myself to not tinker with it as much as I used to. As you can see, I have at least eight different pages, and these are all prior attempts or experiments to see how they function and if they'd be a good fit for my workflow.

Breaking Old Habits

What I'm going to be doing throughout the week and maybe next week is going through these and asking, "Is there anything I can pick out of here? Nope. All right, delete it." I've been livestreaming and creating content for a good 10-plus years, and I have a lot of old habits I need to break.

This is the reason why I wanted to do this episode: to open myself up to you all and say, "Hey, I'm probably worse than you in creating organizational debt." I constantly have to tweak things and experiment with them to see how I can make them prettier or better.

I spend more time doing that than actually creating content. This past week, I was like, "I have to stop doing this." That's why I did the channel reflections video and this episode tonight.

Keeping It Simple

This looks complicated, but to me, this is actually pretty simple. It's proving to myself that I don't need a big cover image or an awesome-looking dashboard with charts and Gantt views and timelines. I just need a task list, a calendar to show me visually what needs to be done and when it's going to be done. That's pretty much it.

It's just a database, a collection of stuff that I've wanted to do, am doing, and have done.

Future-Proofing My Assets

One of the processes was getting the organization of my file structure taken care of. I have my resources with all my assets for each channel. I work in Affinity Designer, so I have all this built into one file that I can create files from within that template.

I also have all the logos I use for different channels and content. I went through and changed all the file names so they're consistent. For example, instead of a random Discord icon filename, it's now "icon-Discord-Blurple." If I want to do a search, all I need to do is search for "logo" and it'll give me everything with logo in the title.

It's harder to do now, but it's future-proofing and making it easier for future me to say thank you.

The Fresh Start Approach

All the old stuff I had basically got moved yesterday and today. I said, "I am starting fresh. This is a fresh start. Burn everything to the ground, build from the foundation." All my old stuff now lives in the archives. I didn't delete anything, I just moved it to a place where it can stay since I hadn't touched any of it in probably months or a good year.

Smart Organization Tools

The stuff I do now all lives in projects. I didn't want to have a folder within a folder because what I used to do was have projects, then two-ton waffle, then 2025, then the actual folder itself. That's a lot of clicks: one, two, three, four, and then four and a half because you're inside the project folder itself.

I'm like, "Let's just have two clicks. Let's try to keep this as simple as possible and work off the prefix." So First Two Hours 2025 April 11th, 0411, Crazy Machines 3. If I do a search for anything that's F2H, it'll display everything for First Two Hours.

Yes, it might seem like this is going to get extremely bloated, but you have to think about it: I'll be able to easily get into this by searching. I can create smart folders that automatically pull up results based on my naming conventions.

Next Steps

There's also an app called Hazel that a lot of people swear by. It can search through your entire operating system for different things and basically takes what I showed you with the search function and lets you set it up as rules. There's also an app called Raycast, which integrates similar elements but improves on them.

Those are some of the things I'm going to be looking into going forward: making it easier so I don't have to go into the actual folder itself. I can just open up Raycast or do a spotlight search to find what I'm looking for.

You're Not Alone

That's basically what I'm going through, and I also want to show anyone who watches or listens to this episode: Hey, you're not alone. There are other people out there who are just as bad or worse as I am. I kind of see myself as the worst at being organized.

I'm not going to say that I'm the perfect poster child for organization, but I'm pretty close to the worst. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me know what kind of organization or workflow you utilize for content creation. I'd love to hear or see your ideas and examples.

You can leave a discussion in the comments, or if you don't want to do that, you can just leave an emoji. A poop emoji, I mean, it's still engagement. If you're listening to this on any podcast player, leave a review, leave a five-star review. It helps get the podcast out there for anyone else to enjoy.

I'm also going to be going through another change and doing a better job of promoting my work as well. I hope to see you next time on the Independent Creator podcast. Have a good night. Later, taters.

The Independent Creator