Hi, this is Chris Hubs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about organization.

I think I’m going to put it that way.

Really, I’m thinking about the idea of cataloging.

There are times I suspect I may have been a librarian in a previous life.

I don’t know, besides my love for libraries.

But one of the things with the collections I have, and I’m thinking here largely about reading and about music, is the enjoyment I get from the organization and sort of cataloging, cleaning up, having tidy, well-organized collections of things.

When it comes to my media files, my music library collection at this point is, I don’t know, 25, 30,000 tracks.

It sounds sad to say, I’m pretty sure at this point I have spent more time organizing, cleaning up metadata, tagging, making sure I have the right artwork and such, with those electronic music tracks probably than I have listening to them, at least a lot of them.

I’m sort of the collector.

When I acquire a copy of a thing, I’m glad to have it.

I’m like, disk space is cheap.

Well, disk space isn’t as cheap as it used to be, but I’m like, let’s hang on to that item.

Let’s keep it.

You never know when I might want to listen to it, and I would rather have a copy of it available so that I can listen to it when I want to.

I will ignore the fact that I’m subscribed to more than one audio streaming service at this point, and so the majority of the music I keep in the collection also I could get from a stream.

But there’s something about having the actual collection for myself that still feels valuable and that I’m interested in, and so I keep it that way.

Every once in a while, I get one of these sort of inklings like, you know, I could simplify my life and I could declutter and I could just get rid of a lot of this.

And would I miss it?

And do I need it?

And I come back to, yes, I would miss it.

And I don’t know if I’d need it or not, but it’s not costing me much of anything to keep it and maintain it.

And so I will hold on to it.

And maybe there comes a day at which the math works out such that the streaming services subscriptions can go away and I can just work from the collections I have.

I don’t know.

I’ve got a very same thing with my collection of TV and movie recordings, all sort of well cataloged and organized and available.

Many of them I haven’t gotten watched yet, but that’s a time and availability thing.

So we’ll see.

We’ll see what I do with that, but same kind of arguments apply.

Curiously, with my book collection, while I am an avid cataloger of books I have completed, and I think I’ve talked about this before, but I’ve tracked basically every book I’ve read for the last 20 years.

And you can, you know, if you’re really bored and want to look at them, you can go to my website and look for the books link, and you can go through all of those there.

I’m less good about keeping track of books that I physically own, that I’ve purchased and are sitting on my bookshelf.

One of these years, I’m going to find a winter when I have time, and I’m going to actually go do that cataloging.

I feel like I’m probably more constrained at this point by not having found an app or software solution that I like for the cataloging, and so I haven’t gone and done that yet.

I will sort of sheepishly admit that this has meant on more than one occasion I’ve gone to, say, Half Price Books, peruse the shelves, gone, Huh, that book looks interesting, and purchased it only to come home and at some point later on realize that’s the second copy of that book I have on my shelf because guess what?

It looked interesting another time I was there.

I’m trying to slow down my book purchases, and that helps eliminate some of that redundancy.

But some actual proper cataloging would also give me the ability to eliminate the redundancy.

I will say that actual book logging of books I’ve read has been very helpful when I occasionally will peruse the library shelves, pull a book off the shelf, go, Huh, this looks interesting.

The plot sounds vaguely familiar from The Flyleaf, and I pull up my book log and look it up and realize, Oh, sure enough, you know, five years ago I read that book, and it was vaguely interesting then, but I don’t probably need to read it again.

So we’ll see.

If I really just need to get into cataloging, I keep thinking I need to create a logging solution for my wife’s inventory of cast iron cookware.

That’s a whole different topic, but every time I see her plot her Excel spreadsheet with all the data listed in it, it just makes me cringe a little bit.

We’ll talk later.