How Staying Organized Can Help You Be Successful

Ever wonder how the pros can handle 10 sessions going on at the same time? The answer is organization! Organization can help in more ways than one, and it’s a staple to have when working on many projects; it’s just not possible without it! Today we’re looking at a couple of benefits of organization, and some examples you can implement yourself when it comes to recording projects!

Photo by Omid Kashmari on Unsplash

Mental Clarity

The most glaring example of staying organized is mental clarity. There are so many instances of this - cleaning your room/house, organizing your taxes, and, for some of you, organizing your school papers into each subject’s specific binder… are you guys who stuffed papers into their backpack in no order doing okay nowadays? 😂

Staying organized lifts a huge weight off of your shoulders, and who doesn’t like that?

It frees your mind up to think about more important things, like the subject at hand. It’s just one less thing you have to worry about.

You can be OVER-organized though… if you find yourself less productive or you’re spending too much time keeping clean, it’s probably a sign you’re overdoing it. Just do the amount needed to keep a clear mind and improve your workflow!

Workflow

Workflow is huge when it comes to actually getting serious with your craft. The faster you can move through projects, the more you can focus on the moves that matter instead of the minutia as counterintuitive as that sounds.

When you don’t have to go and find every single file every time you need one, it saves a little bit of time each time, and it really adds up. Take for example a large track count recording session.

If you need to find the shaker, and it’s hidden in a mess of tracks without order, it’ll take you a good say 5 seconds. Say you need to find it 50 times throughout a session including when you have to edit, mix, etc. That’s 4.2 minutes right there, and if you have to do that for every track, say 30 tracks, that’s 2 hours throughout an entire session simply looking up where tracks are. Obviously this is a little stretched as you'll learn your layout/order over the session, but it still contributes to a large amount of time!

This is why it’s so important to have an order that you know, that stays consistent across projects. If you can cut the search down to 1 second, that cuts down the total time by an hour and a half.

It doesn’t just stop there, there’s plugins you need to find, settings, etc. Knowing where and what your software does is crucial to working fast. And, in this type of work, working fast usually gets you better results, so it’s two fold.

It doesn’t just stop there, again; working fast can save you time, improve your quality, but also one more important aspect: you’ll increase your effective rate if you’re charging for your work.

If you charge a flat rate for a project, typically you find an effective rate. Say you end up with an effective rate of one dollar per hour if there’s 10 hours of work and you’re getting paid 10 dollars. If you cut the amount of time it takes you to do this work in half, you don’t have to work the full 10 hours! So, you have effectively increased your rate by two times, because now you’re getting paid $10 for 5 hours of work!

This can work well for people who work extremely fast. It also works in favor for people who work slow, because they can become more competitive with prices (typically they would need to charge the same price as someone else but who works faster than they do).

Examples

Here’s some examples of the things I do to stay organized:

• Name each file with the date in the form of: YearMonthDay_Project Name.file

• Order and color code my tracks

• Specific file organization layout for recording sessions and also video projects

• Start mixing and mastering with a custom template

• Put equipment back in the same spot and ready to be set up quickly

I won’t go into detail on all of them but here’s a couple.

I name each file like the above to make finding projects and files SO much easier, especially if it was a while back. If I know it was around a certain date/year, I can typically find it fast without going through every single project I’ve done throughout my career (which is a lot). So if something I’ve done in 2018 on August 1st, it would be a folder called 180801_Project X.

Then, when it’s sorted by name, it’s actually sorted by start date; this is crucial to have if you’re copying files to be backed up because the dates usually get screwed up, and sometimes get written to be the date you transfer the copied folder.

Next in the list, I order and color code each track that’s typically the same throughout each session. This makes finding tracks a breeze, especially from the color.

For staying organized for project files, I typically have a folder that contains folders inside of it, with the session file inside the main folder. For audio projects, there’s an Audio Files folder, Bounced Files folder, Stems (if applicable), MIDI, Session File Backups, and the others that auto-generate when the session is made.

If I have a video or photo project, these folders go inside the project folder as well, or in place of if there isn’t any audio project.

For video, I have a Clips folder, Exported folder, Audio folder, and Images folder. For photo projects, I have a RAW folder (what comes out of the camera), Unedited folder (converted RAW files that can actually be read on the computer), and then an Edited folder that contains the edited images and also the photoshop file if applicable.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much time this saves me/allows me to work on other or more things/makes what I do possible. If I didn’t have such systems, there would be no way of finding files at a decent rate, and some files would probably get lost. I couldn’t live without this file system!

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I love finding new ways of speeding up my workflow, let me know what you do to stay organized and become faster at what you do! The only thing I like more than obsessing over gear is finding a better workflow! 😂

-Michael