Here’s a quick addition to the How To Organize Your Music series. It’s a bit of a departure from the method the past posts have taken, but stay with me.
What if the best way to organize your music is to not organize it at all?
In many ways, search is becoming the new organization. It’s becoming less and less important to know where something is than to be able to access it when you want it. This is how Google works, and this seems to be the direction Apple is heading with Spotlight, which in Leopard will add the great feature of being able to search across a network. Simply type a couple letters and the results come flying into place. iTunes has Spotlight functionality built in, too, so it’s easy to find what you want when you want it.
This is obviously an entirely different philosophy than the one put forth by previous articles in this series, which focused on corralling, controlling, and compartmentalizing your music library. But there’s certainly a benefit to this model as well. It’s less time-consuming, for one, not using smart playlists and ratings and genres lets you focus on constructing playlists of songs, not of the more general sounds. Give it a try - focus on enjoying music, not on devising a system which will hopefully allow you to enjoy music in the future. There is only now. Getting Things Done (GTD) might work great for some parts of life, but when the framework stands in the way of your ability to enjoy and appreciate things, it defeats the purpose.
Resist the tendency to analyze and quantify. Let the computer do the work for you.
And just sit back and enjoy the tunes. After all, that’s the point, right?
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