MEMORY PROSTHETICS

What systems and thought-processes do you use to store & organize files/links/media?

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** Christian Drappi

(1) Slack channels/DMs (2) Tweets

arena: I do not use are.na but it looks interesting! Just logged in.
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** Callil

Part of it is compulsion. Part the weird idea that I'll need things someday. Lately I have all my files automatically cloud backup so I kind of solved it by brute force. But now I can't search them very well.

are.na: I like arena because it prompts you to make structure from the beginning. There isn't a blank dumping ground so the UX helps you organize, but it's also kind of fractal with many small nodes making up the fringes and a few larger ones the central repos.
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** Francis Tseng

i have a folder at "~/docs/etc" that is loosely structured. the stuff i dump in the top-level are one-offs or things I don't have enough of to justify a subdirectory, subdirectories are more coherent collections. it's not super organized but I generally can find something I'm looking for pretty quickly. it's like a folder/directory version of are.na. my are.na chans mirror a lot of this structure, sometimes it's like an offline-backup of my are.na chans (for images, at least).

for links I used to have various categorized markdown files that were just lists of links. i had a python script that would automatically sync them to are.na chans (I don't really use it anymore, i mostly just go straight to are.na for links now)

for other files, here's my home dir:

.
├── archives
├── deaddrop
├── docs
├── downloads
├── graphics
├── musics
├── notes
├── photos
└── projects

some of it is related to my backup system..."archives" is where I dump stuff that I want to preserve but probably won't need to access (cold storage), like old projects that wrapped up a few months ago or something. my backup system copies those to other machines/drives and then i can safely delete everything inside of it.

"deaddrop" is where I drop random stuff I want to sync to my phone (e.g. mp3s, movies, books, etc)

"docs" has all my documents, natch, but right now is also a bit of a catch-all...it also includes things like my pgp keys, an encrypted folder of sensitive data, my passwords database, screenshots, a "library" of pdf books/papers, and the "etc" folder i mentioned before.

"downloads" is, obv, where downloads go, but i use it sort of as a "staging" site or a reading queue. i'll put in mp4s or pdfs etc of things I want to get to soon

"notes" are all my markdown notes, these i keep really organized

i think the rest are self-explanatory (happy to explain more if you want!)

are.na: place to find interesting things, to peek into other peoples' thought processes/what they're currently thinking about, a no-pressure dump for research topics that may be transient or that i may only revisit months/years later, a place to give structure to current obsessions, and to share them as well. a big part is sharing to also get other people's input, adding new things, etc. it's really nice to see when someone has added something to one of your chans, when your internet paths/research interests have briefly intersected.
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** Zach

pinboard, messages to myself on every platform that allows this, web history
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** Anon1

Bookmarks, search feature in messaging apps
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** Morgane

I use Notion (www.notion.so) to keep links of articles I want to read (and write notes, etc), and if I don't read those articles within a few weeks, I just remove the links. I delete all media from my phone periodically, and delete most files from my computer. I used to use Tumblr more often to save cool pictures, and while I've been less active, I still look back on my "collection". It's just a lot of nice pictures that sometimes inspire me in my game design, art, etc. One big moodboard!
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** r1b

Systems

Chrome bookmarks
UNIX Filesystem
are.na
Twitter
Slack
Trello 
JIRA 
Markdown 

Thoughts 

I can use this for x
I am interested in x
Person x would be into y 

Notes

I have a folder in chrome bookmarks bar for any project I am actively working on 

I use a .plan file to organize my day to day activities including links to relevant resources 

I use TODO.md file when working on software to organize work and link to relevant resources 

If I am working with others on a project I will store resources in a shared system 

If a resource would be generally useful to others or reflects some aspect of my spirit I will store it in a social system

arena: I just started using it. I love the spirit of it. I wish there were a faster way to maintain it. Nothing is faster than organizing things in chrome bookmarks bar rn
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** anon3

I use Pocket for articles or webpages I want to go back to and read, but I accumulate much and return to read little. Still useful as a process that prevents me from either having a million tabs open (which gives me pangs of anxiety and guilt) or abandoning ideas/stories that I feel a passing connection to (which gives me different pangs of anxiety and guilt). I use my browser bookmarks for keeping track of sites and media sources I actually do return to frequently. I use Pinterest to keep track of visual references for my creative work, recipes, craft ideas, clothes, hairstyles — a sort of aspirational lifestyle curation. Never really replaced google reader after it went away and instead unintentionally diminished/reduced how I consume/keep track of longer-form blogs. I have a folder called 'scraps' on my desktop that seems to serve the same purpose as your 'gray' folder and every 8 months or so I realize my computer is running slow and I have to go through and pare it down/migrate the bits I want to save.

arena: I do not but I just glanced at it and really liked the design/functionality of it so I saved it to Pocket. (Ooof.)
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** Brendan

For links, I try to save everything important to Pinboard. I save "to read" articles to Pocket, and have an IFTTT automation so anything I favorite in Pocket gets added to Pinboard. I'm behind on actually tagging stuff but at least it's mostly there.e Most files / media I store locally on my MacBook Pro…not well organized, lots of stuff in "downloads" folder and a few other random ones. For media I have a folder of a few "to watch" movies on my desktop, and a while back offloaded my iTunes library to external HD. At this point most all media consumption = streaming (Spotify, Netflix etc) so don't do a lot of storage anymore & happy to just access stuff on demand. Though I do have my own media e.g. Logic and FCPX projects stored either locally (audio) or on external hard drives (video)…including archives of old projects & raw media that I honestly wouldn't miss too much if I were to just delete it all. For collaborative stuff or syncing w/ multiple devices I use Dropbox. E.g. I have a Dropbox folder for work stuff, one for plain text files that I sync w/ Simplenote and nvAlt, some other app-specific ones… Also use Google docs / drive for a combination of work stuff and other personal documents / spreadsheets (haven't used Office or any "real" doc / spreadsheet editors in ages…) Very much a hodgepodge but I'm pretty meticulous about at least keeping stuff around / backed up even if not as organized as would be ideal! Let me know if there's a specific area where you're looking for more detail…interesting questions and I've definitely thought about about e.g. how I could perhaps use my Pinboard library to share interesting stuff w/ others. A little while back I made a curated version of my "personal canon" (brendanschlagel.com/canon) but would be great to have something more of a "living archive". Possibly cool to do on github or something (no idea about their file limits but something along those lines would be interesting…maybe limited to readings rather than all media, idk…)

arena: Just made an account / followed some channels but haven't yet used it in any active capacity! I'm kinda invested in pinboard and feels redundant to use both…
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** anon4

Personally, I've accepted the ephemeral nature of digital artifacts. Whether it'd be my work, personal memories, collections, things I find on the internet, etc. I don't spend too much energy trying to 'save' them, except for the ones that matter. Now defining what matters is tricky, but for me it's making sure it's something when I look back at in the 2, 5, 10 year scale they evoke a feeling and shape my life story. I know this gets into the territory of memories and how we interact with them, but all in all, other than a simple cloud/offline folder system I continue to have anxiety of how these things will continue to exist and how/if I will resurface them in the future.

arena: Right now I use one channel to collect inspirational people talking about their work and process. I occasionally use the site to explore, but for now it's focused on this type of content for myself.

https://www.are.na/david-kim--2/fight-the-good-fight
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** Morgan Sutherland

Are.na, Finder folders, Screenshots, Apple Photos Screenshots, Ulysses (text)

arena: I constantly save things I come across to Are.na into one of over 300 channels (lately via the Chrome extension, though for years I've navigated manually to the channel to add a block). I'm only able to keep ~50 channels in my head at a time, so most are left neglected. I create channels pretty liberally still, maybe once every 2 weeks on average. I realized at some point that I very rarely return to channels and that Are.na is for me more of a mechanism for hoarding than anything ("this could be useful someday!" logic). Over the past year I've tapered off my usage considerably.

It remains to be seen how I'll make use of 3 years of vigorous archiving in the future. Perhaps a broad archive creates helpful optionality in the future? If I only refer to 5 channels out of 300+, was it still worthwhile creating all 300? Or perhaps my lack of focus has simply been a bad habit, and the research will fall out of date or become irrelevant.

Otherwise, I've met many great people through Are.na and it's helped me refine my aesthetic and curatorial sensibilities dramatically. On one hand, I'm not sure what this is useful for other than i.e. selecting clothing and home furnishings or taking better Instagram photos. On the other, it's an intrinsic joy, and the skills I developed are handy for research, curation, ideation, and editorial work.
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** Charles Broskoski

I use Are.na and have one unsorted channel for anything I don't feel like parsing at the moment and then many many other channels that I send things to when ever I see something that I immediately associate with a particular thought zone. 

I revisit old channels fairly often and sometimes connect blocks from my unsorted channel into more specific topics. 

I also use a few ifttt integrations (as a substitute for our forthcoming mobile app) to send things to are.na from my phone (feedly to Are.na, and the Do Note app)

arena: I use it in a few different ways. 

One is to remind myself what I'm thinking about and what I find exciting in a fairly general sense. It's a form of introspection that's like digging around in my own brain. 

Another habit I have with Are.na is sort of stirring on a topic (usually something pretty fuzzy that's hard for me to put into words) for a while and then making a channel after I reach a kind of breaking point where it feels like I can articulate what I'm thinking about a little better. These channels usually end up being fuzzy but mark a kind of keystone for me in my own abstract thought history. 

I also follow a lot of people on Are.na and check the feed pretty often. The community is impressive and I often connect blocks to my own channels or go on research tangents based on blocks that other people save. 

In terms of utility there are a few different parts to it. 

From the most practical perspective it's a memory prosthetic, and one that is partially available to other people to look at. Apart from assisting in my own recall, if I want to tell someone about something I've read or some particular knowledge wormhole, it's really easy to just point them to a channel and let them explore it at their own pace. 

Also there's a kind of utility in "open-sourcing" parts of your brain that goes beyond access to information and approaches something like self-actualization (I understand if you're rolling your eyes). Becoming comfortable with letting something as traditionally private as keeping track of your thoughts over time has a way of triggering one to wonder why they are interested in a particular subject or think in a certain way. 

This idea isn't specific to Are.na, but some part of that idea (i think) is why some of our really active users are so interesting to follow. You can see the different parts of a persons interest and start to see patterns in the kinds of channels that people save. Someone said to me recently that knowing someone on Are.na is like knowing the inner workings of their brain over multiple years. 

I could honestly go on and on but I'll stop this ramble here :)
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** Gary Ing

Images (png, jpg, gif only) that I want to recall, for reasons that can range from very plain spoken to hard to describe, are kept in a single, flat, folder on my desktop and synced to Dropbox. Often times, I'll cycle through the images in the folder to recall an idea or memory with an image. Links are kept in pinboard.in and are tagged with keywords (suggested, and authored) as they are often resources/references I'd want to mark as encountered or read on a specific subject matter. It's a textual memory aid. Are.na exist somewhere in between the two; the channels are visually aided recall of links that I've encountered. I also have image specific channels for subjects that I'm investigating, and wanting to share with in a semi-public way.

arena: Mainly as visually aided recall and a place to organize references for specific subject matter that is visual. Aside from my use of it, the feed is an interesting point to give pause to see what people I follow are 'thinking/seeing' as well.
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** anon5

I don't have good methods. I use pinboard (I add links that I really love and want to remember publicly, and I add clutter-y stuff that I want to go back -- like programming links -- on private), are.na, twitter, tumblr, spotify, itunes, searches (through gmail and slack, mostly), goodreads (I put book quotes on there in my 'reviews'), google drive (mostly for notes. have been trying to move away from this because I feel weird about google, but people keep making useful spreadsheets and putting up folders full of books, etc, so I keep going back to it), dropbox, icloud. I've occasionally used s3 to store random bits I want to share. for most things, I don't have any good organization system; I mostly end up relying on my own memory and searches. I've found it hard to organize things that aren't really searchable...the sort of things I don't think about much, and don't really want to spend time naming, so what ends up getting saved, more likely than not, is what ends up going to social media. have noticed that being able to organize consumption really helps me to build myself in that area...I used to be really nerdy about music and watched movies regularly, but I'm a passive listener/movie watcher now once everything became streaming and accessible, and I wasn't thinking about my collections anymore; I started reading a lot more once I started using goodreads. a couple of months ago, I started tracking media consumption type stuff in a bullet journal to track behavior.

arena: I use it mostly to collect images I already have thoughts on and want to collect. it's like developing memes for myself. when I first started using it, I barely went on it (and still maybe only go on are.na about 2x a month) because I kept approaching it like tumblr; I used to use tumblr a lot, and I find that better for casual image discovery, but tumblr's died down a lot, so I've turned to are.na a little bit more for discovery. are.na's helped me when I'm trying to think through some kind of aesthetic or topic and then have a project that's building on that. I had a project when I was trying to design something, and are.na was a good way for me to see the image dump that I could draw from (kind of like google image search that I could curate) and seeing what other likeminded people are into. I've gotten most use from it in the small network of people on there because it attracts a certain crowd of people that I find interesting, so it's an interesting way of finding out what kind of stuff people are doing and getting introduced to new people I enjoy it when I see people adding blocks to channels I've created, too.
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** Sam Hart

my desktop is auto-sorted by date modified. I've also placed folder shortcuts to a hierarchical directory structure located at ~ so I can quickly sort files I generate on the fly. I keep most of my admin files in Gdrive to get cloud backup, also have a NAS at home to serve media and provide a physical backup. Have a vps which hosts my websites and all media related to the magazine.

arena: hierarchically for the most part, my "root" directory is supposed to provide an entry point. though practically I'm starting to think about channels as shared namespace and hope a few people consider consolidating duplicate channels to encourage collaboration over creating personal archives.
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** Lukas WP

I use Notational Velocity for various notes and I have one called "temp" which is probably the most-frequented. I use temp for links & numbers & little things but  I use that as a day-to-day clearinghouse. e.g. if I find a link I want to read but can't at the exact moment, I toss it in "temp" for later in the day. I try to make sure things don't stay in "temp" more than a day or two. 

Most media I consume gets tossed into my "stream" channel on are.na, mostly because I like being able to reread the stream and reflect on consumption, and also because I like being able to find it all again with a quick search or scroll. From there it gets disseminated out into more specifically factored channels. 

Anything I read over 15minutes goes into a "read" spreadsheet where I put its title, the author, and some of my main notes & take-aways. 

I keep most media off my laptop. I have a few places for "temp" files to sit—projects I'm actively working on. I also have a couple places for files I want permanently on-hand (e.g. work forms, some reference documents). But mostly, for instance, if I want to listen to music, either I find it on youtube and listen or I download it, listen, and delete it. 

I do have one external hard drive for some big chunks of media I want to keep around (i.e. my photo deep storage).

arena: uhhh see above lol. 
I think about are.na as a way to share my consumption (regardless of how problematic that may be...) and factoring of documents & media. I think of many of my are.na channels as "essays waiting to be written" and the contents are all the potential documents to reference, whether I am the author or someone else (which is why I make it public). It's also a space that just acts as piles for me to accumulate information on things I am interested in... looking at accumulated channels helps remind me of my thoughts on the subject & where those thoughts came from.
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** anon6

multiple hard drives, could be better organized though. smartphone Safari reading list to read on subway. bookmarks on desktop browser.
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** Anastasia  Davydova 

tumblr pinterest arena. twitter likes. facebook saves. notes app sometimes, screenshots, folders in my phone photo app. youtube likes, youtube playlists. different tumblr accounts to reblog easily categorizable stuff out of my "likes". thoughts process is folder subfolder subsubfolder... but tags are okay too.
somewhat confusing question... i recently began using are.na and am trying to replace all the storage methods i outlined above with it. but that's not all are.na is, because there are a lot of "weird" cool channels on the site that have inspired / peer pressured me into making some "weird" channels of my own. i really want to say "board", not channel. pinterest lingo follows me.. anyway, there's also the collaborative aspect w private channels which i love and def use. instead of uploading a zillion "inspirational" images into detached email chains while working on a project with someone, i just create a private channel and we upload media as we see fit. the comment section is helpful in this case too.
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** Lauren

Instapaper & Pocket for links. To-Doist for tasks and emails to be followed up on. Google photos for cell phone photo backup. Streak for email CRM. Google drive for most things shared with co-workers. Dropbox Paper for in-progress notes shared with co-workers. A spiral notebook for daily note taking which I empty into to-doist or paper/drive regularly.
arena: I don't but i'll take a look.