SOLIDMAGIC

90% of everything is crap.

Crack­ing Magic (4) – Tools

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Now that we have the little note­book or whatever ready for use, it is time to get some struc­ture onto it. Here is the sys­tem I have been using for years and it proved to func­tion perfectly.

The whole thing is to make the amount of sub­folders as small as pos­sible. In the begin­ning, I made the mis­take of mak­ing one sub­folder after the oth­er, think­ing this would make a “per­fect” arrange­ment. I dis­covered that this led into a com­plete mess, giv­ing me troubles to find what I was look­ing for, because I for­got in which sub­folder I put it. So everything had to be simplified.

Here is the struc­ture: there are sev­en main folders. In each one is a alpha­bet­ic­ally sor­ted array of sub­folders. In these, I keep the actu­al files. Here are my main (top order) folders:

01 – books
02 – tricks
03 – video
04 – performers
05 – scripting
06 – ideas
07 – con­struc­tion area

A short explan­a­tion might be neces­sary. I use only sev­en main folders, because I read that the human brain can­not absorb more than sev­en pieces of inform­a­tion at a time. So I stuck to the mys­tic­al num­ber seven.

The titles of the folders are self-explan­at­ory. The 01 – books has a sub­folder struc­ture of folders named after the alpha­bet. So it will look like

01 – books
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z

The same holds true with the folders 02, 03 and 04 (of, course, you are free to change as much as you want). So when I have some­thing for the archive, let’s say an ebook with a routine by Tam­ar­iz, it will go into 01 – books -> T. At the same time, I put it a copy into 01 – tricks. OR it could go to folder 04 – per­formers -> T. You decide which way you want to pick.

You could make some sub­folders into the 02 – tricks folder by adding the cat­egor­ies cards, coins, rope, silks, kid show, men­tal­ism if you want to. So it would look some­thing like this

02 – tricks
cards
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z
coins
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z
mentalism
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z
stand-up
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z
comedy
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on until Z

I use this very simple struc­ture to be able to arrive at any giv­en entry wth a max­im­um of three clicks. So when I search the Tam­ar­iz trick, I either go to 01 – tricks -> cards or (bet­ter) I go 04 – per­formers -> T and then I should be able to get the thing. Here is how it looks like:

screenshot_archive

Nam­ing the files

Even more import­ant than the actu­al folder struc­ture is the way I name the files. At the begin­ning, I was­n’t too good at this, because I did­n’t think this was import­ant. Now I bet­ter and learned that a prop­er nam­ing can be of real help in organization.

That ebook of Tam­ar­iz would be named like this:

Tam­ar­iz, Juan – ebook – name_​of_​the_​publication.pdf

When you decide to use a cer­tain sys­tem in nam­ing the files, you will be able to very quickly scan what you have and find it in no time. The nam­ing gives a real struc­ture to your archive. Also, it is very easy to find some­thing with the com­puter­’s built-in search function.

Tam­ar­iz, Juan – ebook – name_​of_​the_​publication.pdf
Tam­ar­iz, Juan – ebook – name_​of_​the_​publication.pdf
Tam­ar­iz, Juan – DVD – name_​of_​the_​publication.mp4
Tam­ar­iz, Juan – DVD – name_​of_​the_​publication.mp4
Tam­ar­iz, Juan – trick - name_​of_​the_​publication.pdf

The best thing is to start with this renam­ing of your exist­ing data right from the begin­ning, or everytime you move a new file to your archive. For me, it has become a habit when I pur­chase some­thing new for the archive. I change the file­name right when I down­load it into the appropi­ate folder.

Because I know that you want to start right away and are prob­ably too lazy to cre­ate the folder struc­ture, I have made up all that for you and you can down­load the zip-file with all the folders already set-up for use. Down­load it, extract it to your hard drive and start put­ting some stuff into it!

Down­load the struc­ture here: filesys​tem​.zip

Have fun!

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