Six months in a realised my filing system (actually piles) were a woefully inadequate way of managing my work. In fact every time i wanted to find a paper it would turn into a stressful experience and I constantly wondered how it managed to get that bad.....
Alot of it, I think, was to do with me getting anxious and depressed, now a few seminal 'things' have happened that have let me sort out some of the issues causing me stress and I feel more motivated!
I'd been convincing myself for the past six months (in fact, my entire university career) that all academics are disorganized....
I wonder how everyone else manages there's?

======= Date Modified 13 Apr 2009 13:20:15 =======
My bedroom floor is littered with chapter drafts and photocopies of historical material - and papers, all in haphazard piles. The only organisation of material is on my laptop and in the head. Luckily I had the presence of mind to glue many of the sources I needed onto huge A1 sheets and label them by date and theme so I didn't loose them. Sometimes I have found things I have forgotten about!

Filing really isn't my strongpoint - in 'real life'. But my digital libraries of chapter drafts, sources, images, works in progress is in order and regularly backed up. I have seperate folder on my laptop desktop marked things like "early zoological gardens" or "eighteenth-century conchology" with PDF folders and chapter drafts dragged in them. I have a few paper boxes with source sheets (the cut out and pasted A1 sheets) but the rest, I am afraid is in utter disarray!!





:$

In theory, I have coded magazine racks for wallets of papers and the codes are also entered into my endnote library. In reality, many of my papers are in the racks or endnote but note both, and then there's the pile that are not entered into either yet. I have had a few problems finding stuff and have got a few papers twice but it sort of works. I like racks and boxes - it's quicker than proper filing which I would just never keep up with.