Josh (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the Independent Creator podcast. Tonight, we're going to be opening up our our behind the scenes look of things and stuff and actually look at
you know, trying to organize our mess of, you know, hard drives and our whole way of workflow and doing stuff for our content creation. It's just going it's it's something that I have pretty much got down to. You know, I've done it myself. I spent several hours today and a little bit time yesterday as well of, you know, going through the motions and trying to figure out a way to better organize
my workflow and that's just pretty much what I'm going to do is open up myself to you as a as this is kind of like a raw open, not an open wound. That doesn't sound good anyways. So yeah, so the best way to think about is how do you you yourself look into keeping yourself organized? I'm not talking just, you know, your digital files. I'm talking about like
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 and be a little bit more organized as it were? So that's what I'm going to talk about tonight is opening up myself to saying, yes, I've spent many, many hours, almost a good portion of today.
yesterday evening or early afternoon or late afternoon, evening and at night trying to learn about different ways to organize your my digital life where. Looking at back at it, it was kind of, you know, it wasn't too bad. It was it was it was OK. It wasn't, you know, anything to write home about, but it was something that, you know, I could have kept track of. And I knew that I could have made things a little bit better.
especially we're trying to keep organized with the all the logos, the graphic templates that I use to create thumbnails and all sorts of stuff like that. It's something that I knew I would have to eventually come to head and say, I got to take care of this right here and now. And without saying, let's just burn it to the ground and just start from scratch or start from new. I essentially did that.
but all the stuff that I had previously made, I had moved it into an archive. Let me backtrack a little bit because one of the things I was looking into is a method, the para method. I know if you've been around content creation or just YouTube or anything like that, you might have come across or have heard about the Tiago Forte's para method is where you go through and it's,
The para is projects, areas, research, and archives. That makes up the four letters in para. going through it, was something that I had to relearn how to look how I organize things. And the nice thing is that Tego himself said that it's not
something that is set in stone. It's something that, you know, you can use, but you can it's customizable to to pretty much anyone and everybody. It's very dynamic. You don't have to say, well, Paris is projects. That means that projects have an end date. OK, so I'm thinking myself. Well. Projects is stuff like videos like this, a podcast episode.
is a project that I can, you know, put in there. But thinking about it, it's like, well, the yes, different episodes or different videos, they do have an end date when they need to be published and uploaded or uploaded and then published. But it's the fact of that it's an ongoing thing, so it would not be in the projects folder. So this is what I was going through yesterday last night and most of today when I was
redoing all of my organization is I was kind of getting lost in the weeds where I was starting to be getting into overthinking things. Say, OK, like I said, with projects that is good videos, but then once they're done, then you can move them into an archive. Well, I started thinking it's like, why would I move them into an archive? Because it'll break all my links.
for like my task tracking. I have a link to where that project folder into the task itself. So I can easily without having a couple of windows open, I can easily say, I need to find out what thumbnail I'll use. I'll 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. So I'm like, if I move the project, the folder itself,
out of projects and putting into archive, that link will be broken. And I don't want to go through and having to redo a link every single time I move something. So I'm like, what's the best next best case is put in areas. Well, that's what I did. But I got again, I started overthinking myself again. And I was like, well, if I keep it here,
then it's not really going to live. It's not really a project, it's an area. And this is again where it's like I started doing some more research, I watching some more videos and getting kind of some more ideas of different ways of organizing your file structure as a content creator. I'm like, well, maybe if I use a little bit of elements of para and maybe something a little bit more customizable that is
to my liking that fits my workflow, my way of thinking. And I eventually came to the conclusion that, okay, what I could do is I 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. And I got the thinking, is that, okay, well,
Then it becomes a game of cat and mouse. It's like, well, then I start organizing this. And then what happens because, well, I'll title my stuff by year, month, and date. But what happens when we go into like 2026 or 2027 and going into the future? I'm thinking to myself, OK, we need to find a way instead of folders within folders within folders, instead of just have minimal folders. So I'm going to show you actually
What I have set up here.
Let's see if I can do.
All right, so we'll have a little bit of...
Where is?
So this is what I was looking at.
I'll make it little bit bigger for you guys to see.
All right, so let me backtrack here. Let me go back into my NAS.
All right, so what I have is set up. have the, of course, yes, I named my network attached storage, Starbug, Red Dwarf, yeah, too. Because I used to name my hard drives after sci-fi ship names. So I have the Rocinate. I had some other ones. I forget because I had changed them out. But anyways.
So what I did, I still use the paramethod. So I had the projects, areas, resources, and archives. So for projects, I decided, well, what better way to have a reference prefix for each folder? So that's what I did. I created a reference sheet. I have for the first two hours, the independent creator podcast, any independent.
or any creator hub, zero point report, two ton waffle. And I think that's it. I might be blanking on something, but for now, this is what I have I've come up with. So I had 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
If you don't know, I do a video series called the first two hours, which I play a game that I have never played before for two hours. And then at the end of the livestream, go through and review it. So I have them set up with a template that I copy and paste. So I have like a role, which a role means is a talking head. So if you're watching the video, it's this is a role.
This is me. That's typically called A-Roll. B-Roll is where, let's say, the gameplay footage itself, nothing else, or some other things. Audio assets, image assets. Image assets is where I have the promo images. St. Clain used to use blue as my alias several decades ago. Yeah.
I mean, it's something where it makes it little bit easier to remember that your hard drives or your folder locations. It's something fun. yeah, have image assets. I have like my promo stuff that I have created on the Discord event banner. It will be in there as well. Thumbnail assets. This is going to be where I have I'll download like.
screenshots of the game or if there's elements that I need to use for whichever that I might think of using within a thumbnail. So I'll have a space for all that video assets. That is going to be where after I'm done recording the raw edit or raw files like the video, the A roll B roll, the different things that are siloed out.
I'll be living in here that if I wanted to use an external video editor, I'll have assets that I can pull from here and place into Lake Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve or whatever. Thumbnail final is, as you know, it says on a 10. The final thumbnail after building it. And then, of course, you know, the final render for the actual final version of the video after doing all the editing and coding.
We'll go in here. So it's kind of separated out from the raw stuff. It lives in its own folder in case. And this also includes any kind of shorts I will be making. They'll also be living in here as well. And documents is where I take the transcripts, the subtitle file. They'll be all living in here. And of course, when I take the transcripts and pretty them up to post up into a blog post,
a day or so later. So it's kind of like I looked at this. Believe me, I spent hours today staring at the screen going, OK, do I really need this or can I add something else? If I add something else, then it's going to get even more bloated. So this is what I came up with. I did not.
I got from a, forget the person's name, but this is how they have laid out their YouTube video files. So what they do is they have this master folder structure, which has the blank folders here. And all I do is, you know, right click on it and then, uh, duplicate. Take my title from notion and then create the folder and then.
Go on to Next Cloud, get the link, it up or 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. So if I wanted to show, let's say, right here.
I'll bring my notion over.
So I have my task tracker. So these are all the ideas that I have.
If you watch my video a couple of days ago this past Monday, Sunday or Monday, I posted a did a live stream of slight changes that I'll be making to any creator hub. So YouTube channel. One of those changes is that I wanted to at least get post up or get 100 video ideas. And this is so far this is what I come up with so far. And I'm still working on it.
Very, as you can tell, I'm very far away from my goal of 100, but I gave myself at least two weeks to do. So it gives me time to do all of this. And so I can work my way down and to add. I want to do, let's say, E cam basic setting up your first scene like a tutorial video. So I'll put this and put it into the production list and get it all set up.
Going into it, I have, like I said, a space for the project folder.
And that's where I take the link from my next cloud, the NAS link itself, and I post it up in here. And then of course I'll edit or enter all the, like when I'm going to be doing the live or recording of the video, when I want the edits to be due. This is like, this is this little mental note for myself. I need to be done with the edits at a certain date, which is normally the day prior to the posting date or publishing date.
which would be my due date. And of course, you know, I have where this is like the task itself is opened gives me I have it set up for when it was last updated and links for pure tube YouTube blog post link. If it's a podcast episode like this will be I'll have the transistor link here as well. And of course, for the blog post, I have a link to
the content library for the blog posting. And I know in that video I said I'm going to be using ClickUp, but after I know.
When I said that using ClickUp is probably a better option, I had totally forgot that using ClickUp comes with some caveats. One of them is that if you're a web based or the browser based version of it, it's a little slow. Like when you go into like if I go into like the database, it. It opens it up, it's like it's do do do do do.
opens up each one very slowly. So I forgot about that. I'm like, wow, do I want to deal with this for a good year before I drive myself crazy in less than a couple of weeks? So I'm like. Even though I. Notion has some issues, but I kind of. Reside myself to not tinker with it as much as I used to.
As you can see on the screen, have for audio people listening, I have at least eight different pages. And these are all prior attempts or looking at different things, see how they function. If it would be a good fit, how well does it work? Does it work in my my style of workflow? So what I'm going to be doing.
throughout the week and maybe next week is going through these and like, OK, is there anything I can pick out of here? Nope. All right. Delete it. Let's go through here and delete it because I spent hundreds of hours because I've been I've been live streaming and creating content for a good 10 plus years. And I have a lot of old habits I need to break from. And this is the reason why I wanted to do this episode as it is.
is to open myself up to you all to say, hey, you know, I'm just I'm probably worse than you in creating, you know, organizational organizational debt that I constantly have to tweak things to experiment with with them to see how can I make it any prettier? Can I make it any better?
I spend more time doing that than actually doing the work of creating content. And this past week, I was like, I have to stop doing this. And that's why I did the video, the channel reflections video and doing this episode tonight. And it's just one of the things like, OK. Again, getting out after or getting out of my comfort zone and getting this done, opening up
behind the scenes showing you what I'm doing. And this is no, this is my work. You know, it looks complicated, but to me, this is actually pretty simple. It's it's proving to myself mostly that I don't need to have, you know, as big cover image or a big make it look like a.
an awesome looking dashboard with charts and Gantt views and timelines. It's like, no, I don't need any of that. I just need, you know, a task list, a task list, the calendar to show me visually what needs to be done, when it's going be done or when it's going to be going to be done. And that's pretty much it. And it's just a database and it's just a collection of stuff that I've
wanted to am doing and have done. That is basically what I'm that's what I'm doing here. And.
One of the processes, like I said, was getting into the organization of my file structure. That was my main concern, is getting this taken care of and getting it to a point where I feel comfortable going forward with this. Because like I said, with this as a project, I have it all listed out and I have my resources. I have a two-tone waffle that has my assets.
So I'm showing on screen, I have my template folders that have all of the thumbnails, the blue sky had profile headers.
thumbnails, the Discord event banners, anything to do with this particular channel. the same thing for independent creator, any creator hub and stuff like that. I work in Affinity Designer so I have all this built into one file that I can go through and create the files from within that template. That's what I'm trying to say. I also have all my
the logos that I use for the different channels and content that I have. So I have like my two-tone waffle ghost header image. got to any independent creator or any creator hub, Android logo. And I have like the dimensions like it's 512 by 512 pixels and it's the version one. I decided to go from here. So if I make a new version of this, I'll name it
or set it up as version 02. So I know the higher the number, the latest version that it is. So, and then I have like the brands. These are all the different logos. I went through and made sure I changed the names. And this is a lot of work to tell you the truth of going through and making sure like changing the file name for this particular.
icon for Discord. So it's set up as icon Discord Blurple, because that's what it was originally titled. And I have icon Discord Black or icon Ecamm Live. The icon for Ecamm Live instead of live is something like a description. No, that's the name of the program. So I go I went through and change all of the names. So it's it's easier.
If I wanted if I wanted to do a search, all I need to do is do a search for logo and it'll give me all the stuff for the logo as its title logo or wordmark. So I have that. It's it makes it's harder to do now, but it's future proofing and making it easier for a future me to say thank you. So that's that's that's why I was going through the whole.
process of getting this done and taking care of it. Now, for the Unsplash files, I don't change that. I haven't changed that. I know I should because it comes up with its file name that you get from Unsplash.com. And Unsplash, if you don't know, is a great resource for free stock art photos, I should say, that you can use for free.
It is owned by Getty Images, they do. They get images bought it, I think, last year or a year prior. So it uses it. offer a paid version with, you know, the better quality pictures and stuff like that. But they do a lot of free photos that you can you can use. And if you've been following me for a while, you've seen you've seen these before.
Like this one right here, the one with the two arcade cabinets in front of the paper wall. I've used that a lot and also in artwork for the Indie Basement thumbnails and channel art. So I use Unsplash a lot. And of course, I had sound effects. I have to go through.
I have to have to change some of these names like I have all the name or the first sound effects and stuff like that. So it's it's a work in progress, but I got the foundation to where I want it to be. And I know I can change it eventually down the line, but I don't want to. And all the old stuff I had is basically I took yesterday and today and I said, I am starting from
from fresh. This is a fresh start. Burn everything to the ground. We've got from the foundation. Let's build up our inventory and go from here. So I still have all my old stuff here is it now lives in the archives. The old projects I got, you know, zero point report, old episodes in here. That's that's where they all live. So I didn't delete anything. I just moved it into a place that because
I had not touched any of this stuff in probably months or a good year. So it was a good point just to say, OK, all this stuff, archive it. If we need it, we can always call it back or go searching through it again. So the stuff I do is all going to live in projects. And that's all the video files. And like I said, I didn't want to have a folder within a folder because what I used to do is I had like projects and then I had
It goes into two ton waffle or let's just say projects first two hours then 2025 and then The the actual folder itself and I was looking at that like that has a lot of clicks. That's what one two three four and then Four and a half because you're inside the project folder itself. So I'm looking at I'm like, okay, let's just have two clicks Let's try to keep this as simple as possible
and we'll just work off of what the prefix. So first two hours, 2025, April 11th, 0411, crazy machines three. So if I do a search for anything that's F2H, that's first two hours. So it'll display everything for first two hours. And that's the nice thing is
Yes, it might seem on the outside that this is going to get extremely bloated, but you have to think about it is that. What's going to happen is that I'll be able to easily get into this by searching. Let me show you, actually, I use this is all in Mac Mac OS. So what I could do is right click.
on projects and I need to actually go to file and I need to do a new smart folder.
So I want to do a search in projects. Click on the plus and name matches first two hours.
So it's going to pull up first two hours. OK, so let's say I want to look for and we're in like next year and I want to look for all the ones in April. So I'll do because I know my naming, the how I name things is FTH 20, 25, 04. And it gives me everything that was in April. So I can easily search for something without
having to go into the actual folder itself and say, oh, here's my folder.
And I know there is an easier way, which I want to do is try out the app called Hazel, which is a very it's a lot of people swear by this this this app where it. Can search through your entire. Operating system for different things, it basically takes what I just showed you here with the search and you can set it up as.
a rule. So if I want to find stuff for April 2025 and the first two hours, you automatically can create a rule for that and run it and it'll produce the results for that. There's also an app called Raycast, which I believe integrates or has elements of what Hazel does, but it improves on it. So
Those are some of the things I'm to be looking into going forward is to, you know, making it easier so I don't have to go into the actual folder itself. I just open up Raycast and or, you know, do a spotlight search. Raycast overwrite or takes over spotlight and searches through your entire system for whatever you're looking for. So that's one of the things things the next step I'm going to be taking and my
rebuild of my organization skillsets as it were, because I have not been very good. I'll admit that I've, as you saw, my projects and my other stuff was very not good, as it were, where it was just, you know, not good. There's other terms, but we'll keep it nice here.
Yeah, that was basically that is what I'm going to go through. And to also help show anyone who watches or listens to this episode that say, hey, you're not alone. There's other people out there that are, you know, just as bad or not worse as I I kind of see myself as the worst of being organized. And. Yeah.
I'm not going to say that I'm this perfect or to post your child for this organization, but I'm pretty close. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed this episode and do let me know what kind of organization, bio organization that you utilize yourself or your workflow for content creation. Would love to hear or see your ideas and your examples and you know,
You can leave a discussion in the comments down below. If you don't want to do that, you can just leave an emoji, a poop emoji. I mean, it's something to engagement. Now, what I also want you to do is if you're listening to this on any kind of podcast player of your choice, either Apple podcast, Pocket Cast, Spotify, leave a review, leave a five star review. Definitely would love to see that. And it helps also get the
podcast out there for anyone else to enjoy. And I am also going to be going through another change and doing a better job of promoting my work as well. So I hope to see you next time on the Independent Creator podcast. And have a good night. Later, taters.