The Art of Organization

I think a lot about the way in which I listen to music. Ever since I got my first iPod in 2009, I’ve been carrying around the entirety of my music collection in a tiny box in my pocket. And ever since I started doing that, I’ve been thinking about the way in which I listen to music.

I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but whenever I get new music, I end up listening to that new music a lot. And then I’ll start to intersperse the older stuff more and more, and then I’ll find I’ve gone six months without listening to that music. And sometimes I’ll be scrolling through my playlists and realize there are things on there I haven’t listened to in YEARS. It all seemed very erratic and disorganized.

So, I created a spreadsheet.

First, let’s work together and try to figure out why this bothers me. It’s just music, right? I just hate the thought of things not being used to their fullest extent. And music has the ability to create mood and influence inspiration. More than just something to listen to while you work or exercise, music has the ability to be used as a tool to improve the human experience. Right? So then, why am I allowing myself to get stuck in a rut?

One of the things I do as part of my job is create and practice process work. Process work is the act of coming up with a standard method of approaching a problem. If you do it well enough, the entire team can end up approaching problems in a standard way and there will be a sharp increase in productivity. Some would say there would be a sharp drop in imagination and design. Well, then we can discuss changing the processes. See, I’m always suspicious of any process that’s set in stone with no room for improvement. That’s not the best way to approach problems either. If we all did that, the wheel would never have been invented.

After years of experience in watching how process work can really improve a teams approach to tackling problems, I started to wonder if processes could be followed on an individual basis. Then I realized the very question was stupid, as OCD people have been proving the validity of that idea for years.

For instance, my wife can never find her iPhone and half the time has no idea where her iPad is. I know where my iPhone, iPad and iPod are at all times. Because I follow a process. I might not have a chart to outline it, but it’s there.

So I implemented a process for tracking the way in which I listen to music. It’s based in a spreadsheet, of course. I have a list of the playlists on my iPod, and a column containing the date when the playlist was last listened to. Any Playlists that I’ve been meaning to listen to get the date field highlighted in yellow, so I can scroll through and remember them immediately when I’m unsure of what I’m going to listen to that day.



Many people don’t use playlists like I do. They let their iPod organize things by artist or album or genre. That’s fine. The playlist method allows me a greater degree of control. (It’s all about control.) I’ve assigned different numbers to certain eras of music, so I can scroll through them with ease. 03 being Orchestral movie soundtracks. 06 being music from the 1960’s. 07 being music from the 1970’s and 07-Disco being very special to my heart. (Natch) 17 is Holiday music and 19 is songs and stories from super hero cartoons and old children’s records. You heard me.

There are 21 categories in all, not counting the genius playlists.

Some will say that organization tampers with the freedom and beauty of music as an art form. Poppycock! Music is all about structure, design, organization, timing, and precision. It took me awhile to see it that way, but music is mathematics at it’s most beautiful.

This system took awhile to set up, considering how much music I have. But maintenance is easy, as long as you follow the process. Part of the process is not letting Lorie and the kids anywhere near my iTunes.

This method of music handling offers some data to me that I can use as insight to my music enjoyment. I can tell what genre’s easily please me or if certain artists or composers are particularly strong with me. Right now, the Beatles are in a powerful lead.


One thing I don’t do is tally how many times a playlist has been listened to. I mean… I don’t want to get obsessive about it or anything.

I mean… iTunes already keeps a tally of how many times a particular song has been played.

Just… just not on the playlist level. iTunes can’t tell you how many times a playlist has been listened to.

I mean, there’s really no need.

Thanks,
DCD

P.S. I just added a ‘tally’ column to my spreadsheet.

P.S.S. If I kept a history of dates, rather than just the date last played, I could detect patterns over the year! Do I listen to orchestral movie soundtracks more in the Spring and the Beatles in the Summer! Things like that. Hmmmmmm..

My Obsession with Spreadsheets

Among my many weakness is my love of a good spreadsheet.

There's something about putting data into an orderly fashion into little columns and rows in electronic format that just speaks to me. I love it. Maybe it's something about my job as a computer programmer or my database organizational training. But I think it's much deeper than that and comes part-and-parcel with being OCD.

My earliest memory of being a little too obsessed with organization comes from the summer of 1978. I was playing cars with the neighborhood kids, one of those rare instances when I agreed to play something other than super-heroes, Star Trek, or Star Wars. It was my box of toy cars and my porch, so therefore it was my rules. I couldn't quite decide on the division of the cars and the setting and circumstances in which we would play. One of the other kids asked me "Can we stop getting ready to play and just play?". That was a ridiculous notion and I told him as much. A few minutes later, I ended up playing alone.

At some point when we lived in Rochester, New Hampshire between 1979 and 1981, I got my hands on my Father's typewriter. My sister played with it for a few minutes and completely lost interest. But I remember sitting and working for awhile on a list of super hero names categorized under the teams in which they belonged. The experience was at once both pleasurable and frustrating, as I kept making mistakes and having to start over.

The ability to enforce order out of chaos is kind or rare, I think. Fifteen years ago, my Assistant Manager at Blockbuster marveled at the way I would storm in on a busy Friday afternoon, make a pile of all the chores he couldn't quite get done, and begin delegating tasks until the pile was gone. My distrust manager loved my "task clipboard", where I hand drew a grid and mapped out through the following week which member of the management team was to perform which task and on what shift. Other store managers thought it was way over the top. My assistants loved it, clearly knowing their expectations in advance. It was my first spreadsheet, before I actually had access to a computer.



This is my 'spreadsheet' of k-cups. Lorie was in charge of the k-cup drawer for about three minutes.

I've begun to create spreadsheets for no other reason than to get my overly-active brain to calm down for a few minutes. Compiling data on my various hobbies in a way I hadn't thought of before. It helps me when I'm really angry about something to just calm down and focus on something simplistic, monotonous, and structured.

Let's look at the spreadsheets on my iPad at this particular moment in time. I have 59 spreadsheets.

9 spreadsheets are in the "old" folder and no longer viable.
18 spreadsheets are dealing with comics in some way.
4 spreadsheets I use with the kids and parenting.
4 spreadsheets are for Ashton alone.
4 spreadsheets for music (remind me to tell you about my crazy iPod playlist habits sometime).
3 spreadsheets tracking my obsession with toys.
2 spreadsheets that help me with the budget.
2 spreadsheets for Christmas.
2 spreadsheets with notes on my computer set-up.
2 spreadsheets helping me track my exercising.
2 spreadsheets keeping track of my movies.
1 phone list for work.
1 gift notes spreadsheet.
1 list of items loaned out.
1 spreadsheet designed to help me with time management.
1 Years in Review quick reference guide (remind me to tell you about THAT sometime).
1 spreadsheet I made Lorie put together to track work on our house addition.
1 spreadsheet tracking blog posts. This particular post is slated for 7/20/2012, according to the spreadsheet.

It's worth noting that many of these spreadsheets have multiple tabs. For instance, one of my movie spreadsheets has a tab listing out the Hammer Horror films, the year in which they were released, whether they're in my collection, and whether I've seen them. Love me my Hammer Horror.

Say what you will, but all this spreadsheet madness just serves to make me better at my job.

You might wonder how all this is related to the blog theme of historical perspective. It's not, directly. But indirectly, I keep thinking it's all related. All my passions and hobbies have interrelated in some way. And you'll notice it's not just history I'm interested in, but specifically how history is related to pop culture.

And then there's this:


I started this spreadsheet a couple of days ago after I wrote about my Flash re-read. It struck me that I "needed" to track the major milestones in comic book publishing. And through that, divide out those milestones by character, chart the dates, and see if any interesting patters show up.


And look at that! We just discovered that Kid Flash and Aqualad were created within a month of each other. Both would go on to be founding members of the Teen Titans in 1964!


And you thought I was going overboard! Pshaw!

Thanks,
DCD