Whether you're a copywriter, blogger, videographer, photographer, graphic designer, or web designer, staying organized as a creative with a gazillion projects floating around can be a challenge, and knowing where you are in each project at any given time can be even more of a challenge.
Towards the beginning of my photography business, I was booking, culling, editing, exporting, backing up, and packaging up sessions without a true rhyme, reason, or rhythm to my madness. One session would be in the editing phase, another couple in the exporting phase, a few others in the packaging stage, and for the life of me, I couldn't remember which one was in what step! After a few days of researching, I finally came up with a system that worked for me: a visual way to organize my laptop desktop where my "open" session files could be accessed easily at any time:
I broke my process down into 5 easy stages/action steps: working files (including culling, editing, an exporting), put in a gallery (I use and love the PASS gallery system), burn to USB (love my Flashbay drives!), back up to hard drive (or, in my case, since I'm extremely paranoid, to TWO hard drives), and finished files, which means the files can be discarded from my laptop safely. Then, once I exported the Photoshop file as a JPEG, I set the JPEG as my desktop and organized my projects into each category. Using these five stages, I know where every single one of my active sessions is at any given time in the process.
I'm sure there are much more intricate programs, software, and apps that can do this exact same thing - but this easy to implement system has been my go-to for the last 4 years and was an easy way for me to get organized and change the way I work. If you're interested in trying out this easy desktop organization system, click here to download your free PSD desktop organization template! Customize your categories, add a photo, export the file as a JPEG, set it as your desktop screensaver - and voila! You're ready to start organizing!
