18 Comments

Totally relate. That is all. 🙃

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Thanks!

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I've been keeping folders of ideas for years, and many of them have come to fruition. Not those with possible big payouts, though. Like you, I constantly have ideas, and like you I believe it's important enough to make files and folders. Go you!

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Great minds think alike! Yes, and maybe the "payout" is just realizing, "Hey, I don't need to write that anymore. I've moved on," which is often a good thing.

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Humm. Folder commitment is big!

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Exactly! It is!

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I am cringing. You are describing my computer and my purse and my bedside, not to mention my workspace. I would love to read that book consisting of every first line you ever came up with. And I did not know that there was a generation that did not understand the concept of folders. Thank you for thinking so much and then writing it down so we could relate.

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Yes, but sometimes all the chaos comes in handy, right? Right? That's what I'm telling myself.

I found the article about Gen Z and folders because I find that my college students are often surprisingly inept when it comes to computers. They're brilliant on their phones. But computers? Not so much.

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Organizing my numerous folders and retrieving them is a constant challenge for me! Your descriptions of idea helped me feel less overwhelmed. I do indeed think too much!

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Yes, there are several "ideas" I've gone to create folders or files for only to find one already exists. Such is life. Thanks for reading and commenting!

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Ditto Laura W. ‘Totally relate. That’s all.’

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Their phones and tablets do entire searches with ease. No need to organize anything, really, just type in a keyword and there’s your thing.

That trend is accelerating on laptops and desktops as more and more organizations move to cloud storage.

I resist, but I fear I am Baker on Saipan.

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Maybe they have better file names than I do, because that whole search thing never works for me. There’s a whole graveyard of lost writing somewhere on my laptop or in the cloud or wherever good ideas go to die.

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See, that’s just it: they’re not searching file names. They’re searching keywords. Modern cloud search will look inside the files themselves.

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Yeah, I don't know how to do that.

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If, IF, I ever get an idea for an article or whatever, I start a new draft post on Substack, usually abandoned it, it autosaves itself (kind of like a weed), but when the fullness of its time has come, I find I can use some of those drafty weeds as grist for the mill. The piece almost always wings off in a different direction than I originally intended, but I'm okay with that because it seems to work. For me, those grand and glorious ideas that wake me up in the middle of the night almost always come to nothing. I had the best idea ever for a book title ten years ago, but couldn't think of anything worthwhile to put behind it. There are no epiphanies in my world and my natural filing process is like the one used inside of a tornado funnel.

p.s. I forgot to mention that because Substack is web-based, my idea weeds are available on whatever device I am using and from wherever I am working, such as a tornado shelter.

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"Try again. Folder again. Folder better." -- not quite Samuel Beckett, but close enough

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Nice.

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