Organizing your research
A post about boxes, folders, and creating order from chaos - including stories about Robbie Williams, Stanley Kubrick, and the phenomenon of folie a deux.
Hello! My plan this week had been to write more about finding stories – but this time unfolding stories, adventures you can leap into, or even orchestrate. There’s no better way to start a journey than thinking, “I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I know just enough to know that whatever it is, it’s going to be good.” That’s how I felt when I set off to sneak into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones in Them, and also when I visited Chainsaw Al Dunlap’s grand Florida mansion to see if he might be a psychopath. They were great days.
It takes a lot of thought and planning to get to that place, so I will write about that process, and soon. But this week three subscribers - Curtis James, Dave Lee and Ally Farrell - asked me versions of the same question, and it’s such a likably practical one I thought I’d go for it first.
Curtis asked: ‘What’s your version of Kubrick’s boxes? Do you have a system you use for tracking and then reviewing those seeds of ideas?’ Dave reiterated the question, and Ally wrote, ‘When you go down a rabbit hole, how and where do you document everything in an organized and structured way?’
Organized and structured are words close to my heart. You should see some of my family members’ laptops. It’s like someone blew up a library. But not mine. Life is chaotic enough without your screen being a cacophony of horrifically overlapping folders.
If people don’t recognize Curtis’s Kubrick reference, here’s a two-minute clip from my film Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes. I got to be the first person to look through the thousand boxes Kubrick left behind. I originally called the film Citizen Kubrick, but I changed the title because of concerns it might perpetuate the myth of Kubrick the crazy hermit. But if I was on a search for his Rosebud, this clip shows that maybe it wasn’t inside a box, but was the box itself:
Anyway, back to how I organize my own research. I thought the easiest thing would be to show you some screenshots.
My main screen is as minimalist as possible:
And that’s basically it. I can watch the sunset over the Pacific unencumbered by pandemonium. Inside those two folders are many more folders.