Crack­ing Magic (4) — Tools

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: filesystem.zip

Have fun!

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