Getting My Digital Life Together: Organization Overhaul for Content Creators

Hey everyone! Just wanted to share my recent journey completely rebuilding my content creation workflow and file organization. Maybe this will help some of you who are struggling with the same mess I was in. The Breaking Point I spent years with a chaotic system of hard drives, random folder structures, and broken links everywhere. I finally hit the wall and decided to burn it all down and start fresh (well, moved everything to archives, but you get the idea). What I Tried: The PARA Method Started looking into Tiago Forte's PARA method (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives). Great concept, but I got lost in the weeds overthinking it. Do videos go in Projects if they have end dates? What about ongoing series? If I move completed projects to Archives, all my task links break. My Solution Kept the PARA structure but made it work for content creation: • Projects: Everything stays here, no moving to archives • Naming Convention: Prefix + Year/Month/Date + Title

• F2H = First Two Hours series

  • ICH = Independent Creator Hub,

  • etc.,

  ,

Project Folder Template Each project gets these subfolders:

• A-Roll (talking head footage),

• B-Roll (gameplay/supplementary),

• Audio Assets,

• Image Assets (promos, banners),

• Thumbnail Assets (screenshots, elements),

• Video Assets (raw files),

• Thumbnail Final,

• Final Render,

• Documents (transcripts, subtitles),

Task Management Integration Using Notion to track everything. Each task has a direct link to its project folder on my NAS. No more hunting through folders or broken links when projects move around. Future-Proofing Spent hours renaming all my assets with consistent naming:

• "icon-Discord-Blurple" instead of random filenames,

• "logo-TwoTonWaffle-v02" with version numbers,

• Easy searching: just type "logo" and get everything,

Smart Organization Using macOS smart folders and planning to try Hazel or Raycast for even better searching. Instead of clicking through folder hierarchies, just search by prefix or date. The Reality Check I've been creating content for 10+ years and I spend more time tweaking organization systems than actually creating. Had to stop the perfectionism and just pick something that works. You're not alone if your digital life is a mess. I probably had one of the worst systems out there, but this rebuild is actually working. What organization systems do you use? Any tools or workflows that have been game-changers for you?